USING EXPERIMENTAL-DESIGN TO ASSESS THE CAPABILITY OF A SYSTEM

Experimental design techniques were applied to the task of characteriz ing the inspection capability of the machine vision component of an au tomated laser hole-drilling and inspection system for gas turbine engi ne manufacturing The system uses a laser to drill very small cooling h oles in gas turbine engine combustor rings and a machine vision compon ent to inspect the holes. The machine is designed with a closed loop a lgorithm to adaptively control the laser drilling operation based on t he inspection results. An experiment with blocking factors provided a disciplined framework for data collection to characterize the capabili ty of the vision system component during the development phase. This e xperiment provided a better understanding of the system's capabilities and the user's design requirements, which has yielded system improvem ents.