Control of ultrasonic surface rolling process machine tool for aero-engine blades

The surface quality of blades affects the performance and security of aircraft engines. Ultrasonic surface rolling process (USRP) can be used to improve service life of alloys. However, blades with complex design specifications are difficult to processing, especially the thin-walled leading/trailing edge should bear the loads during the process of ultrasonic rolling. Therefore, it's still a challenge to apply USRP for the surface strengthening of blades. In this paper, an integrated system that combines USRP and a multi-axis machine tool is presented to improve the surface quality of blades. Further, the control of the machine tool is reasonably designed. Finally, the proposed method is validated by an experiment on a real blade. This proves that the system can be effectively used for automated strengthening of aircraft blades.