Vision aids turbine blade inspection

Turbines that are housed in aircraft engines must run at 30 thousand rpm in temperatures greater than 800ºC for hours. Engine manufacturers understand that even small surface defects can reduce performance, increase maintenance costs, and reduce the useful life of an aircraft engine. They need to inspect turbine blades to maintain the efficiency and reliability. One manufacturer inspected its blades by hand and human eye. Inspectors measured hundreds of features and checked for surface defects at depths of thousandths of an inch. Manual inspection was costly in time and labor, and subjective. Because manual inspection was time consuming, there was no systematic inspection of every blade, and the company approached Orus Integration to design a turbine inspection system. The resulting system dubbed Orus’ INL-1900x2T houses two stations that perform these inspections. The first metrology station features two Basler GigE cameras with telecentric lenses and two collimated blue LED lights. Surface inspection station is achieved using four Basler GigE cameras. Two diffuse on-axis lights and one diffuse backlight illuminate the surface station. For more information, go to: http://www.matrox.com/imaging/en/press/feature/robot/stress/