Renishaw’s new high performance blade measurement suite

Renishaw is highlighting an establishing family of higher efficiency hardware and software for blade measurement equipments that are particularly developed to assist the measurement and production of aerospace blades.

Renscan5™ REVO® measuring large blade
Photo by Renishaw

All items go with the multi-award succeeding REVO® 5-axis measurement system including APEXBlade™ planning softwarefor REVO sweep scanning and DMIS programming,  MODUS™ airfoil analysis for the evaluation and reporting of blade section profile and airfoil qualities,and SurfitBlade™ to aid reverse engineering of the complete airfoil.

Blades have historically  been measured in sections due to the limitations of measurement procedures. Now, the brand-new family of Renishaw products allows the entire blade  to be assessed inspected and properly permitting infinite section or full surface analysis based on high precision contact probe data

APEXBlade is a software package designed to quickly generate collision free programs that drive the REVO measurement system to carry out complex ‘sweep scans’ that will collect point cloud data from across the complete blade surface. The CAD model is imported into the virtual REVO CMM environment prior to the automatic generation of the measurement plan. Both transverse and longitudinal scans are supported and each sweep can be split, which is useful for edges where the actual position is expected to be significantly different from the nominal CAD. Once the user is happy with the program, a DMIS file is generated that can be executed within Renishaw’s MODUS metrology software.

An essential benefit of the latest Renishaw approach to blade measurement  is that a cloud  of idea facility information factors is created over the whole airfoil and root surface areas. The MODUS factor cloud sectioning (MPCS) capability after that enables ‘on area’ areas to be created by intersecting any kind of specified aircraft with the caught factor cloud. This could be done at the time of dimension, or in the future if more parts at various places are called for, without the demand for re-measurement of the blade.

Integrated bladed rotor montage
Photo by Renishaw

The MODUS airfoil module then allows the user to take the nominal aerofoil sections available from the CAD model and the actual sections from the MPCS to provide blade fitting functionality for the reporting of blade section profile and aerofoil characteristics. MODUS offers comprehensive graphical reporting tools and the profile measurement results, which are fully integrated with all other feature measurement reports, can be output in pdf file format.

For users requiring a reverse engineering capability, Renishaw’s SurfitBlade software is an offline application used to generate NURBS blade surface forms for use in downstream processes such as computational fluid dynamics and finite element analysis. It also allows average blade geometry to be established from a series of blade results.
In summary, the Renishaw airfoil inspection suite provides automatic generation of the CMM program, rapid, high accuracy REVO data collection and comprehensive tools for cross section or full surface analysis.

For further information, please visit: www.renishaw.com

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