A Novel Approach for the Assembly of Fabricated Aero-Engine Components

Currently the manufacturing of aero-engine intercase is primarily a single piece titanium casting and has slightly deteriorated material properties as compared to sheet metal parts and has long manufacturing lead time. As an alternative solution to above problems, the VITAL (Environmentally Friendly Aero Engines) project aims to design, manufacture and test the critical technologies required to develop new type of clean and low noise aero engines by developing innovative technical solutions to reduce the engine's weight, thereby reducing both fuel consumption and CO2 emission. This requires the fabrication of small and weight optimised parts which will be automatically manipulated, welded, assembled and inspected in a flexible fabrication cell. The paper introduces a novel techniques for compensating the deformation that occur in aero-engine fabricated components and potential component handling errors using standard industrial robots, an advanced end-effector, mathematical processing, non-contact metrology systems and cell control system. The system described in this paper uses in-process measurement sensors to determine the component's exact location prior to the assembly operation. The core of the system is a set of algorithms capable of best fitting measurement data to find optimal assembly of components.