Blade counting tool with a 3D borescope for turbine applications
Kevin Graham Harding, Jiajun Gu, Tao Li, Guiju Song, Jie Han · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2014
Video borescopes are widely used for turbine and aviation engine inspection to guarantee the health of blades and prevent blade failure during running. When the moving components of a turbine engine are inspected with a video borescope, the operator must view every blade in a given stage. The blade counting tool is video interpretation software that runs simultaneously in the background during inspection. It identifies moving turbine blades in a video stream, tracks and counts the blades as they move across the screen. This approach includes blade detection to identify blades in different inspection scenarios and blade tracking to perceive blade movement even in hand-turning engine inspections. The software is able to label each blade by comparing counting results to a known blade count for the engine type and stage. On-screen indications show the borescope user labels for each blade and how many blades have been viewed as the turbine is rotated.