Development of Pre-Repair Machining Strategies for Laser-Aided Metallic Component Remanufacturing

Remanufacturing worn metallic components can prolong the service life of parts that need frequent replacement but are extremely costly to manufacture, such as aircraft titanium components, casting dies. Additive manufacturing (AM) technology enables the repair of such valuable components by depositing filler materials at the worn area layer by layer to regenerate the missing geometry. In general, damaged parts would be inspected and pre-machined prior to material deposition to remove oil, residue, oxidized layers or defects located in inaccessible regions. Therefore, the motivation of this paper is to introduce pre-repair machining strategies for removing contaminated materials from damaged components and materials surrounding inaccessible defects to ensure that the target damage is repairable. The current research targets at common failures comprising surface indentations, erosion, corrosion, wear and cracking, and the machining strategies for each defect were proposed. Each strategy takes the 3D scanned damaged model as input and the cut-off volume around the defects is defined by using different approaches. Pre-repair machining toolpath and program were generated based on the defined cut-off volume and finally, damaged parts were machined using the proposed strategies