Abstract
An impeller is a type of high-speed rotor that is used to compress or transfer fluid under high-speed and pressure at high temperatures. The impeller is composed of an axial hub and several blades attached along the hub. The weight and shape of an impeller must be balanced, because their imbalances can cause noise and vibration, which can lead to the breakage of the impeller blades during operation. Thus, the hub and blades of an impeller are commonly machined in a 5-axis NC machine to obtain qualified surfaces. The impeller machining strategy or process plan can not be easily obtained due to the complex, overlapped and twisted shapes of impeller blades. Skillful machining process planners may generate appropriate machining strategies based on their experiences and floor data. However, in practice most shop floor data for the impeller machining is not well-structured such that it does not effectively provide a process planner with information for machining strategies and/or process plans. This paper reports the development of a case-based machining strategy support system (CBMS) that employs case-based reasoning to obtain the machining strategy of an impeller by using the existing machining strategies of the shop floor. The CBMS generates impeller machining strategies through a stepwise reasoning process considering the similarity features between the blade shapes and machining regions. A case study is provided to demonstrate that CBMS can generate useful machining strategies facilitating process planners. The developed system can simulate the tool paths of impeller machining and runs on the web.
