This article shows a method for inspection scheduling of structures made by additive manufacturing, derived from reliability function evaluations and overhaul inspection findings. The routine was an adaption of an existing method developed by the authors for welded components; in this latter case, the routine used a stochastic defect-propagation analysis for pores and lack of fusion defects of additive manufacturing process, instead of the weld liquation crack. In addition, the authors modified the specific stress-intensity factor for welded components to consider additive manufacturing-related material property variability, defect distributions, flaw-inspection capabilities, and component geometry. The proposed routine evaluated the failure rate and inspection intervals using the first-order reliability method (FORM + Fracture) to alleviate the computational cost of probabilistic defect-propagation analysis. The proposed method is one of the first applying reliability concepts to additive manufacturing (AM) components. This is an important milestone, since in 10 years, additive manufacturing is to be used for 30% of the components in aeroengines. This paper presents an example comparing the reliability and cost of a jet engine, with components either made by additive manufacturing or welded parts; in the process, the reliability AM-key features are found, and overhaul schedules of an airplane fleet made with AM components are defined. The simplicity and performance demonstrated in the comparison make the proposed method a powerful engineering tool for additive manufacturing assessment in aeronautics.

This article presents a novel methodology for the inspection scheduling of gas turbine welded structures, based on reliability calculations and overhaul findings. The model was based on a probabilistic crack propagation analysis for welds in a plate and considered the uncertainty in material properties, defect inspection capabilities, weld geometry, and loads. It developed a specific stress intensity factor and an improved first-order reliability method. The proposed routine alleviated the computational cost of stochastic crack propagation analysis, with accuracy. It is useful to achieve an effective design for manufacturing, to develop structural health monitoring applications, and to adapt inspection schedules to airplane fleet experience.

It is well known that friction is really important to reduce amplitudes of vibration of rotor blades. Underplatform dampers are a common solution for introducing friction damping, but there are also other friction damping sources on blades that are produced in places with high normal loads and small relative displacements (e.g. lockplates and blade-disc joints). Several approaches based on the classical Coulomb friction law have been used in order to model the friction damping at those interfaces, but their results are not accurate enough for those cases with small displacements where high normal loads appear. This paper presents simulations of typical cases of friction on rotor blades (underplatform dampers, lockplates and blade root) using a method based on macroslip and the method developed by ‘Industria de TurboPropulsores’ (ITP) based on microslip (InTerPart MIcroslip COntact method), and their comparison with experimental results obtained with several tests performed at Imperial College London (IC). The comparison shows that, for cases with high normal loads and small displacements, the ITPMICO method obtains further more accurate results than based-on-macroslip one.

It is well known that friction is really important to reduce amplitudes of vibration of rotor blades. Several approaches based on the classical Coulomb friction law have been used in order to model the friction damping at those interfaces, but their results are not accurate enough for those cases with small displacements and high normal loads. A more accurate method has been developed (InTerPart MIcroslip COntact method in [1]) to represent the damping introduced by these kind of friction sources. An improvement of this method has been made taking into account a more-in-depth study of the influence of normal stresses in those contacts areas under high normal stresses and small displacements (using the blade attachment friction source as reference). The paper includes a detailed study of the sensitiveness of different blade attachments to different normal stress distribution along the contact face, and the influence of this distribution in damping results. Experimental results are also presented to make comparison with simulation ones. These experimental results have been obtained from the test rig used in case 3 ([1]), but using different attachment geometries under the same conditions.