TURBOCAM "high fives" revolutionary inspection tech

Constantly changing surface geometries, pin-wheeling shapes and tight, intricate features make turbo machinery components ?impellers, blades and blisks ?some of industry's most complex and exacting shapes. TURBOCAM International achieved leadership in this specialized field by mastery of five-axis machining and five-axis programming software. However, efficient inspection of increasing numbers of complex parts was frustrated by slow, tedious, stop-and-go measurement inspection on a legacy 3+2 axis coordinate measuring machine (CMM). Changing 3-D part geometries required many different probe orientations, plus frequent stylus and tip changes for difficult to reach features, explains Dave Romaine, quality assurance manager. "We would have to stop the CMM and calibrate each re-orientation of the probe. That was compounded as we inspected multiple blades around a part.?As five-axis experts, TURBOCAM staff were quick to see the potential of a revolutionary scanning system from Renishaw that makes possible automated, programmable five-axis measurement at speeds and accuracies never before possible by CMMs. The Renscan5 scanning system offered the capability for continuous five-axis interpolated motion, comparable to TURBOCAM's five-axis machine tools. In January 2007 TURBOCAM became one of the first adopters of the new Renscan5 continuous five-axis inspection capability. Installed on a new Wenzel LH8.10.7 bridge-type CMM at the company's Dover, New Hampshire, USA plant, Renscan5 transformed part measurement and inspection from a bottleneck to an enabler. High-speed continuous probing routines are reducing programming time, set-up time and measurement time by 50% and more. Besides faster throughput, Renscan5 time-savings allows the taking of many more data points for greater measurement precision and frees up CMM time for qualification of turned blanks and in-process checks before final machining passes. Those powerful advantages led TURBOCAM in early 2008 to become the first company worldwide to add a second Renscan5 CMM, a larger Wenzel LH10.12.8, this time at a new facility in nearby Barrington. In this new facility, Renscan5 is an "essential resource" says Romaine, that is being developed to support higher-throughput production generated by around-the-clock, reduced-staff manufacturing. XSpect Solutions, now part of Wenzel, did the installation of Renscan5 on both the new CMMs. TURBOCAM is a preferred supplier of both production and prototype bladed parts to aerospace, automotive and industrial turbo machinery OEMs. Renscan5 uses two patented hardware breakthroughs to speed part checking, generate more data points for analyzing part form, and increase available CMM run time: "Active" probe head Named REVO, a powered head provides infinite positioning capability between simultaneous coordinated motion in vertical and horizontal rotary axes. This allows the low-mass two-axis head, a 3-D measuring device in its own right, to perform most of the motion during inspection routines. Infinite positioning allows continuous motion, optimizes part access, and delivers high accuracy part measurements. The active head avoids dynamic errors caused in rapid acceleration/deceleration of the larger mass of a CMM structure. Low-mass, low-inertia design allows Renscan5 to measure at up to 500mm/sec vs. conventional CMM scanning that is typically limited to 5-15mm/sec to avoid dynamic errors. REVO repositions continuously on the fly, simultaneous with measurement, unlike indexing heads which first must be locked into position, after which the CMM provides the measuring motion. On complex parts, says Romaine, "Hundreds of calibrations have now been eliminated, saving us hours of calibration time." Renscan5 allows the CMM's three-axis platform to be used primarily to "rapid" the REVO head into positiAir Max 90 Check In