Modeling of worn surface geometry for engine blade repair using Laser-aided Direct Metal Deposition process

Engine blade repair requires obtaining the worn area and generate corresponding tool path for deposition. In this paper, an automated worn surface modeling method was proposed to regain the missing volume of damaged blades. Reverse engineering was utilized to reconstruct models of blades. The reconstructed damaged model was best-fitted with the nominal model. Cross-section area comparison method was used to detect the damaged layers. Ray casting method was adopted to intersect the damaged layers to extract the missing volume. Tool path was generated and repair experiment was performed using Laser-aided Direct Metal Deposition process to validate the proposed method.