Automatic Borescope Damage Assessments for Gas Turbine Blades via Deep Learning

To maximise fuel economy, bladed components in aero-engines operate close to material limits. The severe operating environment leads to in-service damage on compressor and turbine blades, having a profound and immediate impact on the performance of the engine. Current methods of blade visual inspection are mainly based on borescope imaging. During these inspections, the sentencing of components under inspection requires significant manual effort, with a lack of systematic approaches to avoid human biases. To perform fast and accurate sentencing, we propose an automatic workflow based on deep learning for detecting damage present on rotor blades using borescope videos. Building upon state-of-the-art methods from computer vision, we show that damage statistics can be presented for each blade in a blade row separately, and demonstrate the workflow on two borescope videos.

Efficient optimisation of structures using tabu search

This paper presents a novel approach to the optimisation of structures using a Tabu search (TS) method. TS is a metaheuristic which is used to guide local search methods towards a globally optimal solution by using flexible memory cycles of differing time spans. Results are presented for the well established ten bar truss problem and compared to results published in the literature. In the first example a truss is optimised to minimise mass and the results compared to results obtained using an alternative TS implementation. In the second example, the problem has multiple objectives that are compounded into a single objective function value using game theory. In general the results demonstrate that the TS method is capable of solving structural optimisation problems at least as efficiently as other numerical optimisation approaches.