Remanufacturing of compressor blade by laser direct metal deposition and subsequent multi-axis milling

Centrifugal compressor, as an important energy conversion mechanical device, is widely used in energy, electric power, petroleum, chemical, natural gas transportation, metallurgy and other industries. It plays an important role in the national economic development. Remanufacturing and maintenance of damaged centrifugal compressor components have been one of the main tasks to be overcome due to the huge potential market with the continual increase in raw material and manufacturing costs. Laser direct deposition provides an attractive and cost effective means for repairing or remanufacturing high value engineering components. In this paper, an advanced methodology for the remanufacturing of complex geometry and expensive components via reverse engineering, free-form surface modeling, laser direct deposition repaired and machining is presented. The approach involves the integration of 3D non-contact digitization to obtain the point cloud data of damage parts, adaptive free-form surface reconstruction to get the digital model of damage location, laser direct deposition process containing slicing and path planning and subsequent multi-axis milling operation. Each operation is individually automated and interconnected mutually in order to reduce the total repair time. The methodology has been successfully implemented on thin-curved centrifugal compressor blade. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed repair methodology can be considered a reliable and time-cost effective as compared with the current remanufacture approaches.