Air Force turbine blade repair
Appears in 1 lecture.
Appearances across the corpus
Illustration of weld-buildup additive repair of high-value turbine blades. 25 weld passes, ~7mm buildup, on a $500,000 blade. Justifies HIP-cast-blade economics.
The Air Force has a multiple-ten-million-dollar system out in Oklahoma City. They own a pair of jet engines, and this is a turbine blade where the tips have worn off. They built it up by welding — 25 passes, that's one millimeter. So they built up less than a centimeter, seven-tenths of a millimeter or so, and they machined it. They're refurbishing this blade, and the different microstructures show lots of little bitty weld passes to build that back up. Why? Because this kind of blade isn't hollow, it's not single crystal, but it still costs about $500,000, and it's worth repairing. Any questions?