The disassembly model of steam turbines for virtual maintenance

Virtual maintenance on steam turbines can reduce downtime, expense and effort necessary in the actual maintenance. Disassembly analysis is based on the specific disassembly model which is the integration of geometric information extracted from the CAD assembly model and other information added manually. In the paper, according to the structural characteristics of steam turbines, disassembly information making up the disassembly model is extracted and categorized. The representation of the disassembly model is illustrated using a hybrid graph. Finally, the hybrid graph is decomposed into a directed graph and an undirected graph which are then interpreted as an adjacent matrix and a precedence matrix respectively in order to reduce computational complexity and be processed by programming, when a complex product like steam turbines consists of a large number of parts. The novel idea in the paper is that matrixes are introduced to avoid the combinatorial explosion to a great extent.