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Surface variations are an unavoidable byproduct of any manufacturing process and may lead to deviating part performance and even elevated part rejection rates. Because traditional computer aided-design approaches are aimed towards production of idealized, nominal geometric shapes, the wide geometric-and statistical-variability typical for any manufacturing process remains unrepresented and is frequently ignored during design. Thus, the present work aims at a more realistic design approach and, therefore, develops a collection of computer-aided design strategies for accurate representation, statistical analysis and prospective estimation of surface deviations with validation examples on aero engine turbine blades.
The CAD representation of real manufactured surfaces requires the ability to accurately recreate complex geometric shapes. This is achieved by automated re-parametrization of any CAD face of interest as B-spline surface with a rather dense control point grid. Face matching to scanned manufactured samples is then performed by calculating control point displacements, which successfully deliver surface representation errors below typical measurement uncertainties on multiple matching examples from turbine shank and hot-gas faces. Since inference of performance variability due to manufacturing is usually limited by the amount of scanned manufactured parts, a probabilistic model is formulated based on singular-value decomposition of control point displacements and identification of dominant manufacturing modes. This allows generation of an infinite set of synthetic deviating surfaces faithful to experimental deviation patterns.
Nominal geometric features may significantly differ between design iterations and manufacturing modes may not necessarily be transferable between different designs. Thus, deviation estimation may remain infeasible before manufacturing. To enable deviation estimation during the design phase, the present work proposes a machine learning strategy to identify deviation patterns explained by nominal geometric properties-such as relative position and local orientation-and use them for deviation estimation on new designs. This strategy is able to predict realistic stress variability induced by shank deviations of a turbine blade design using only surface deviation information from three given designs, which encourages machine-learning approaches as valuable tool for geometric deviation estimation as part of robust design.