System and method for reducing waste generated during fabrication of engine components
AssigneePratt & Whitney Canada Corp. (P&Wc)
InventorChristopher GOVER
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
A method of fabricating parts, comprising: identifying a location of a defect in a piece of solid base material; generating a cut path through the piece of solid base material as a function of the location of the defect, the cut path, when executed, creating the parts from the piece of solid base material, the function including locating the cut path through the piece of solid base material such that all the parts, once cut out of the piece of solid base material, exclude the defect; and fabricating the parts from the piece of solid base material by executing the cut path, the executing including cutting the piece of solid base material along the cut path.
Claims15
A method of fabricating parts, comprising:
- identifying a location of a defect in a piece of solid base material;
- generating a cut path through the piece of solid base material as a function of the location of the defect, the cut path, when executed, creating the parts from the piece of solid base material, the function including locating the cut path through the piece of solid base material such that all the parts, once cut out of the piece of solid base material, exclude the defect;
- and
- fabricating the parts from the piece of solid base material by executing the cut path, the executing including cutting the piece of solid base material along the cut path.
A system for fabricating parts, comprising:
- a material-inspection module operable to identify locations of defects in a piece of solid base material;
- a fabrication module operable to execute a cut path through the piece of solid base material to fabricate the parts;
- and
- a cut path generation module operable to receive the locations of the defects from the material-inspection module and to generate the cut path through the piece of solid base material based on the locations of the defects such that, the cut path, when executed by the fabrication module, excludes each defect of the defects from each part of the parts.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.