4: The Plane Scanning Process

4: The Plane Scanning Process
Friday 19th August 2011

When you're scanning a whole aircraft, absolute resolution is not always the most important factor - speed of capture is. A grid of measurements spaced across an aerofoil is incredibly useful to CFD engineers - but the ideal spacing for these measurements is probably 1mm apart. Reducing that spacing brings diminishing returns - and vastly increases the time for measurement - and the CFD processing time.

It was with this in mind that Phase Vision specified their Quartz 1200DBE/4W scanner for the task of scanning the aircraft's larger surfaces. This scanner produces a grid of 2000x2000 measurements in a few seconds. That grid can be spread through a volume of 2x2x2m - an incredible 8m3 measurement volume, resulting in a measurement spacing of 1mm.

The benefits of the Phase Vision Quartz scanner is clear from this scanned image - almost the entire tail of the aircraft has been captured in a single scan. This sequence took around 10 seconds to capture. Each measurement has accuracy expressed in microns. This is an incredibly rapid way of capturing the shape of large objects, with great detail and high precision.

In areas that required even greated detail, we used the Quartz 800DBE/4S. This is a smaller scanner, supporting measurement volumes from 0.03m3 up to 1m3. This allowed us to capture the finer detail of the aircraft - such as leading edges.

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