Great Power Technology

After completing the four-stage simulation of Dragon Heart, Ye Zhou was not in a hurry to start the fifth-stage simulation. There were two reasons for this.

First of all, there are still 4 technologies in hand, and it will take some time to fully digest these technologies; and Li, the sedan project of Liming Factory has recently entered the production and manufacturing stage from the initial image reading and analysis stage. His work suddenly became busy. He had to rush to various workshops to check material properties and manufacturing processes every day. When he got home, he wanted to sleep on the pillow. He really didn't have much energy to carry out high-intensity simulations.

According to his plan, he planned to get through the most difficult cold start stage first, and then take time to complete the final stage of simulation after the sedan project was mature and the manufacturing process was basically smooth.

Early that morning, Ye Zhou came to the thermal processing workshop as usual. The engineer in the workshop had made an appointment for him the night before and wanted to ask him to help with the processing of wide-chord hollow fan blades without convex shoulders.

After arriving at the workshop, Ye Zhou saw that the engineer named Huang Liangxin who had contacted him before was already working in his office.

Ye Zhou walked up and knocked on the door. The latter looked up and saw it was him, and quickly stood up and ran out to greet him.

"Gong Ye, I'm really sorry. I was reading documents just now and forgot to pick you up."

"It doesn't matter, there's no need to engage in such nonsense."

Ye Zhou waved his hand and continued to ask:

"What problems are you encountering now?"

"The main problem is the SPF/DB process. Although we have made fan blades before, we have never made such a giant fan blade with a length of 1.8m, so there are problems in the operation process and standardization. Please help me this time I came here just to ask you to help me take a look and check."

"We have conducted trial production of fan blades twice, but the results were unsatisfactory."

Ye Zhou nodded and replied:

"No need to call you yours, just say you. What is the specific problem? Have you conducted a self-examination?"

Huang Liangxin quickly took out a stack of documents from the table, placed them in front of Ye Zhou and replied:

"We have organized two self-examinations and corrected some parts of the operation that did not meet the document requirements. However, for some reason, the manufactured fan blades failed to meet the requirements in terms of strength and creep resistance. I was thinking, is it? It’s not that we didn’t heat up fast enough when doing superplasticization, it’s that there’s a problem with the surface stress of the titanium alloy coating.”

Ye Zhou was stunned for a moment when he heard Huang Liangxin's words.

Logically speaking, a turbofan blade that is perfectly manufactured under modern industrial technology should not have stress concentration problems. If it does occur, the reason is most likely due to an unstable heating process or uneven heating in various areas. of.

Titanium alloy is a metal with extremely high strength at room temperature but extremely poor plasticity. It is insanely difficult to process it into a three-layer hollow fan blade commonly used in modern aerospace engines.

Therefore, the mainstream processing technology in the world is to use superplastic forming + stretching. This manufacturing process requires that each part of the titanium alloy be heated at a stable speed to a temperature range that satisfies its superplasticity and allows diffusion connection. This The range is generally between 900 and 1100 degrees Celsius.

However, the specific temperature control must consider the characteristics of the composite material wrapped in titanium alloy. The conditions faced by each manufacturing process are different. Even in the complete document obtained by Ye Zhou, there is no reliable function to describe it, so only It can only rely on experimenting time and time again.

However, the cost of such experiments is very high, because you cannot judge whether the temperature is appropriate or whether stress concentration has occurred on the surface of the titanium alloy during the manufacturing process. You can only wait for it to be formed and then use professional instruments to measure it.

The waste of manpower and resources brought about by this is huge.

If you want to solve this problem, unless there is some instrument that can measure the stress concentration point on the surface of the fan blade during the thermoforming process, so as to eliminate the concentration by changing the local heating rate.

At present, there seems to be no type of instrument in the world that can do this.

——

Except for Ye Zhou himself.

Thinking of this, Ye Zhou asked:

"Do you have any trial production plans today? Take me to see the heat treatment process."

Hearing Ye Zhou's words, Huang Liangxin nodded quickly. Just half an hour later, the two of them were standing in the heat treatment workshop with full body protection.

Production workers carefully put various materials into the lathe according to the requirements of the operating documents. They monitored every value on the screen. Once the value jumped beyond the range required by the drawing, they needed to report an alarm immediately.

The greater the number of such warnings, the lower the success rate of manufacturing this fan blade.

Everyone stared at the numbers nervously, except Ye Zhou.

He wasn't looking at system readings, he was looking at the blades themselves being cast in the machine tool's viewing porthole.

At this time, the manufacturing process has reached the critical stage of titanium metal coating. The temperature is gradually rising. Ye Zhou stares closely at the surface of the fan blades. His talent as a "structural master" is running wildly, trying to find possible defects on the fan blades. stress concentration point.

This kind of stress concentration point is different from any situation that Ye Zhou has been exposed to before. Its concentration level is too low, and the signal it brings to Ye Zhou is also extremely weak, and he has to constantly eliminate those factors that cause Ye Zhou in the process. The titanium alloy is not fully stretched, causing only temporary stress concentration.

After staring at the leaves for an hour, Ye Zhou's eyes suddenly lit up.

"The temperature at the leaf shoulder is low. Adjust the local temperature and increase it to 100 degrees first."

"Okay, adjust the parameters!"

Huang Liangxin said to the operator beside him.

As the temperature gradually rises, the stress concentration point with obvious signal in Ye Zhou's eyes gradually disappears.

He nodded with satisfaction and continued to look at the blades in the porthole.

This superplastic forming machine tool is a machine tool independently developed and manufactured in China. It has a tensile and compressive load of 25KN, a torque of 200Nm, a 25KN actuator stroke of 4 inches, a torsion actuator twist angle of 270°, and an ambient temperature adjustment and control range of -75 to 1400°. C, belongs to a very advanced group of similar machine tools. Without this machine tool, the imitation work of GE-9X would be basically impossible.

After a few hours, Ye Zhou's eyes were already sore. The blades finally took shape and entered the cooling and fine polishing stage.

Ye Zhou and Huang Liangxin returned to the office. The latest test results would still take several hours. He drank two cups of tea with Huang Liangxin and asked about the progress of the processing, then turned and left the workshop.

He couldn't wait here. There were still many workshops with the same problems as Huang Liangxin waiting for him to solve.

He was busy until about six o'clock in the afternoon. Ye Zhou left the work area and went to the factory canteen to eat. However, as soon as he stepped into the canteen, someone chased him from behind and grabbed his arm.

"Leaf work! It's done! The leaves are done!"

The visitor was none other than Huang Liangxin, with a smile of undisguised surprise on his face.

He never imagined that the young man in front of him could actually solve problems that they could not find from the data just by observing with the naked eye.

——

Of course, this is not a fantasy, but this ability is often only found in older engineers with decades of experience.

And the young man in front of him was only 23 years old.

Ye Zhou was not as excited as him, but asked calmly:

"Have the process parameters been recorded? Can it be cured?"

For Ye Zhou, it is not important to be able to solve the problem once. What is important is to solidify the solution to the problem so as to avoid the recurrence of similar problems in subsequent processes.

Otherwise, will I still have to stare at every blade I make in the future?

That's too much nonsense.

Hearing Ye Zhou's question, Huang Liangxin nodded repeatedly and said:

"It's recorded! We will organize everyone to study today and conduct an experiment tomorrow. If it succeeds, this process can be solidified!"

"Okay. Let's go eat."

Ye Zhou gently patted Huang Liangxin's arm, and the latter followed him into the canteen with a happy face.