A Robotic Vision System for Turbine Blade Cooling Hole Detection

Gas turbines are extensively used in flight propulsion, electrical power generation, and other industrial applications. During its life span, a turbine blade is taken out periodically for repair and maintenance. This includes re-coating the blade surface and re-drilling the cooling holes/channels. A successful laser re-drilling requires the measurement of a hole within the accuracy of ${\pm}0.15mm$ in position and ${\pm}3^{\circ}$ in orientation. Detection of gas turbine blade/vane cooling hole position and orientation thus becomes a very important step for the vane/blade repair process. The industry is in urgent need of an automated system to fulfill the above task. This paper proposes approaches and algorithms to detect the cooling hole position and orientation by using a vision system mounted on a robot arm. The channel orientation is determined based on the alignment of the vision system with the channel axis. The opening position of the channel is the intersection between the channel axis and the surface around the channel opening. Experimental results have indicated that the concept of cooling hole identification is feasible. It has been shown that the reproducible detection of cooling channel position is with +/- 0.15mm accuracy and cooling channel orientation is with +/$-\;3^{\circ}$ with the current test conditions. Average processing time to search and identify channel position and orientation is less than 1 minute.