IEEE Future Directions
Related Articles
Today, inspecting an airplane engine is a complicated endeavour. Before any take off engines are inspected on the outside, looking for tell tale signs of problems. It is not possible, however, to look inside. This is done when a major check is scheduled. To look inside several parts of the engine have to be dismounted and that take some 5 hours.
Rolls Royce has teamed up with Harvard and Nottingham Universities to find an alternative way to carry out the inspection. The idea is to have a swarm of robots so small that can be deposited inside the engine using small guiding ducts. Each robot can be equipped with a video camera and would send images to an operator as it crawls around inside the engine.
This project is part of Rolls Royce IntelligentEngine Vision, foreseeing artificial snakes and insects like robotic swarms that can enter inside an engine, inspecting even the tiniest recess.
The operator can be nearby the engine or can be observing from remote, from the Roll Royce main site, thus providing qualified assistance to workers on the spot.
An inspection carried out with these tiny robots may cut down the required time from hours to minutes. Each robot composing the swarm is intended to be 10mm in diameter. So far the prototypes are bigger and more research is required to scale them down to the desired size. These robots will be deposited inside the engine by a “snake” robot, acting like an intelligent pipe able to crawl inside the engine from the outside.
In addition Rolls Royce is planning to embed robots, pencil like, in the engine to monitor its various components during operation. They will be thermally insulated to sustain the high temperature inside the engine and will work as tiny periscopes. A sort of more advanced sensors. The captured images will add to the millions of data already harvested today by sensors in the engine enriching the Engine Health Monitoring System.
Inspection is just part of the overall task. If the inspection discover a problem, that problem needs to be fixed. Here again Rolls Royce is working on robots that can autonomously repair the engine. At the moment they have two project, FLARE and Remote Boreblending Robots. The former is based on the robot-snakes that can enter the engine from the intake blades and crawl to the point where fixing is needed and carry it out. Clearly not everything will be “fixable” in that way but Rolls Royce estimate that a significant number of fixing, like to the thermal coating in the engine that is subject to (relatively) frequent deterioration can be fixed in this way rather than requiring the disassembling of the whole engine removing it from the aircraft and then mounting it back, a very lengthy and costly operation.
The latter is a robotic tool that can be operated from remote, usable to fix problems in the blades (another critical part of the engine).
I just wonder how they will make sure all the robots in the swarm will get out of the engine once inspection is done. May be they don’t care and accept that a few of them will be ejected as the engine powers up…
