A novel cooling hole inspection method for turbine blade using 3D reconstruction of stereo vision

Abstract Cooling holes (number 100 ∼ 200, diameter 0.3 ∼ 1.2 mm) are important heat dissipation structures of a turbine blade in aero-engine. Due to the small sizes and similar contours of cooling holes, it is difficult to extract and match their features by traditional stereo reconstruction methods. This paper proposes a novel cooling hole inspection method for turbine blades utilizing 3D reconstruction technique of stereo vision, which combines the stereo vision principle with the invariance of cross-ratio. The feature points of contours are extracted and matched by calculating two intersection points of circular contours and a line through the center points of adjacent cooling holes. Additionally, the 3D points corresponding to the feature points are reconstructed, by which, the diameters of cooling holes can be calculated successfully. Moreover, measurement experiments verify the effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed method. The experimental results show that the average errors of the standard circle ruler and tiny hole sample are within 0.05 mm, which satisfies the inspection requirement of cooling holes.