The Airflow “BlueGun”: one of the latest innovations signed by CRMA:”

The world of repair is punctuated by daily challenges faced by the teams. CRMA overcomes them by looking for the best solution whenever a potential gain of quality, of cost, of TAT is identified... One of the results of this constant analysis, is an innovation, the famous Air flow BlueGun: a portable test bench to test a multiholes configuration combustor just after the shot- peening cycle (on GE90, GP7000 today and hopefully soon for last generation CFM & GEnx.).

Mains issues to solve

After the application of a TBC (thermal barrier coating) on a multi-hole combustor liner (a total of 50 000 holes considering the inner & outer liners), some holes get clogged and have to be unclogged with a glass-bead blasting process before going to the airflow bench test.

“Often times, at this point the part does not meet the airflow requirements and needs to be shot-peened again. Quite a waste of time going back and forth between shot-peening and air flow bench test, due to the lack of visual indicators on the part”

Ilyas Kraouti

Product Optimization Manager

An adaptive solution

The engineering & innovation teams of CRMA did not lack imagination. They came up with a tool closely related to the process.

“The engineering team (RDI) came to the MRO Lab with their idea and after several brainstorming , their thoughts welled towards the solution of developing a specific & creative tool: a portable localized airflow system, which was rapidly dubbed “Airflow BlueGun” in the shop… as you can easily understand from the photo!”

Erwan Guerin

CRMA Innovation Manager

Benefits of the solution

This process optimization contributes to the improvement of the TAT and to the reliability of the repair deadline while avoiding going back and forth between two steps, one of which is at the end of the repair process.