DEVELOPMENT OF A REVERSE ENGINEERING PROCEDURE FOR UPGRADING AND MANUFACTURING OF LEGACY MECHANICAL AND STRUCTURAL COMPONENTS

Abstract

In this article, a reverse engineering procedure has been presented to achieve an upgraded design applicable to legacy mechanical and structural components of aeronautical systems. In this way, a methodology comprising re-engineering and rapid prototyping methods has been proposed. Assuming no available useful original design data, this procedure focuses on re-producing engineering design data to develop an engineering platform for innovative design. In this procedure, first cloud point data are extracted by laser scanning to create 3D solid parametric modeling. Then, reasonable changes are applied to the original design to achieve a new design compatible with requirements and available rapid prototyping techniques and material resources. A special attention has been paid to stress and fracture analysis to ensure reliability and damage tolerance capability of the new design. The method is benchmarked using an actual aircraft component.

Keywords

• re engineering
• optimization of mechanical components
• reverse engineering
• fracture analysis