Turbine blade measurement on Mitutoyo platform

XR Aero Components and Nextec Technologies 2001, are proud to announce the successful installation of Nextec's innovative WIZblade solution on Rolls Royce China production floor.

XR Aero Components, a Rolls Royce Joint Venture in Xian China and Nextec Technologies 2001, are proud to announce the successful installation of Nextec's innovative Wizblade solution on Rolls Royce China production floor.

Wizblade is Nextec's new laser scanning solution for turbine blades and NGVs inspection, and it positions Nextec as a leader in this field.

Using the new Wizblade, XRA quality control specialists are now able to measure and inspect turbine blade in-line in a significantly shorter time of a conventional CMM based system.

"A complete quality control procedure that until today lasted eight hours while using a conventional CMM with a touch probe, now takes just over four hours including the measurement of airfoil sections and edge profiles" says Jacob Waits, XRA General Manager.

"We are now able to virtually double our throughput, to overcome bottlenecks at the quality control stage and to ensure a faster delivery to our customers while testing a higher sample rate of the products" "We are offering the most advanced solution in the market to all compressor and turbine blade manufacturers and MRO (Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul) companies, both for finished (machined) and unfinished (forged or cast) blades", says Danny Shacham, Nextec's President.

"Thanks to its technical expertise and infrastructure, Nextec succeeded to develop a breakthrough solution based on our WIZprobe laser probe, Nextec's premium motion controller and user-friendly turn-key Wizblade software" "This installation in the Rolls Royce J.V.

in China is based on a Hexagon Metrology Global Image platform following the 10 Wizblade systems for compressor blades measurement on Mitutoyo and Coord3 platforms we already have at Rolls Royce Israel.

We already have new installations in the USA on Sheffield platforms, more Wizblade systems in Japan on Mitutoyo platforms and a new installation at IAI - Israeli Aircraft Industries for the MRO market" adds Mr Shacham.

The entire inspection process for a new turbine blade type includes the blade CAD model and tolerances input, cross sections selection definitions, Automatic Blade Alignment, transformation of coordinate system into blade orientation, measurement of the relevant cross sections and actual deviations from the CAD model.

A typical Automatic Blade Alignment Time is 90 seconds and each full cross section scanning takes only 30 seconds.

During the scanning process, the system records the numerical data in real-time and displays measurement results on the screen.

The data is automatically compared to the designed values and to the required tolerances.

Thus, the measurement results and quality control reports are generated in a real time and presented both graphically and numerically.

The Wizblade can serve as a turnkey solution with its own platform or can be mounted as a Wizblade Kit on a CMM platform.

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