CMM with laser scanner helps aviation company retrofit aircraft

IMaghe provided by Exact Metrology

Situation

Located in Sugar Grove, Ill., Chicago Jet Group was formed in 2003 to serve the corporate aviation industry. The company provides aircraft acquisition, aircraft management, charter services, prepurchase evaluation, aircraft avionics, aircraft consulting, and aircraft maintenance.

Chicago Jet Group was retrofitting older Dassault Falcons avionics and needed a CAD model of the panel to see how it would fit.

Resolution

Joe van der Sanden, application engineer from Exact Metrology, scanned the panel with an 85 series Hexagon Romer Absolute Arm coordinate measuring machine integrated with an RS5 laser scanner. The machine offers tactile probing and high-speed laser scanning of surfaces and features on a variety of materials and finishes.

The laser scanner’s horizontally oriented laser scan line and fully automatic exposure settings help simplify general-purpose scanning, regardless of the application. In addition, with midrange width at 115 mm, the laser scanner helps simplify digitizing of large surfaces. It can be removed from the arm for touch probing of hard-to-reach areas and remounted without calibration.

Through the on-wrist OLED display screen of the measuring arm, the laser scanner allows for measurement feedback and settings adjustment at the point of measurement.

After the panel was scanned, dimensions were obtained in Polyworks Inspector software, which covers the product development cycle from part and tool design and prototyping to final inspection of assembled parts. Reverse engineering was performed using Geomagic Design X, which combines history-based CAD with 3D scan data processing to enable the creation of feature-based, editable solid models compatible with existing CAD software. This software allows users to reuse existing designs without having to update old drawings manually or remeasure and rebuild a model in CAD.

--Exact Metrology Inc.