An Industrial Workflow to Minimise Part Distortion for Machining of Large Monolithic Components in Aerospace Industry

Part Distortion due to inherent residual stresses has resulted in recurring concession, rework and possibly scrap worth millions of Euro in the aircraft development and manufacturing life cycle. The paper presented here outlines an industrial solution based on years of fundamental research dated back to as early as mid-1990 to the development of a practical industrial solution to optimise part distortion in large monolithic components in the aerospace industry. The developed system was designed to empower manufacturing engineers at the shop floor level to help with their day to day activities from characterising residual stress profile in materials to numerical simulation to arrive at an optimised solution. The industrial technology suite includes the following technologies: (i) characterisation of inherent material residual stresses by adapting the established layer removal method for implementation on an industrial CNC machining centre; (ii) generation of residual stresses profiles using displacement measurements; and (iii) optimisation of part location in the materials through numerical modelling. The machine operator can characterise the bulk residual stresses in the materials on a standard CNC machining centre. The residual stresses profiles will subsequently be used as inputs via a user-friendly GUI, which will drive the numerical calculation to be performed remotely in supercomputers, in order to deliver an optimised solution.