Design of the cross-structural cathodes in electrochemical machining of aero-engine blades

ABSTRACT

Blades are crucial parts of aero-engines. Their manufacturing is difficult because of their thinness, complex profile and stringent requirements. Electrochemical machining (ECM) is an important approach for manufacturing blades, but it is difficult to machine the leading and trailing edges. This article adopts cross-structural cathodes in ECM to solve the open electric field space problem. The key difficulty in the design of cross-structural cathodes is the position of the crossed-point. The height and the offset of the crossed-point are optimized using the ANSYS software. The simulation results show that the position of the crossed-point obviously affects the machining accuracy, along the leading and trailing edges of the blade. A pair of cross-structural cathodes with one uniform section is designed, and a series of corresponding ECM experiments are carried out. The experiments demonstrate that the ECM process is stable, the profiles are sleek and the machining dimensional error is reduced to 0.08 mm at the leading and trailing edges of the blade when using the new cathode structure.

KEYWORDS:

• Blade
• ECM
• cathode
• leading edge
• trailing edge

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Nature Science Foundation of China (51675271), the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (BK20171413), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (NE 2017003) and the Qing Lan Project.