Abstract: Complex equipment such as aero-engines, usually contain a good deal of pipes and cables which have important influence on product performance and reliability. Pipe routing has to consider space constraints and engineering rules, and manual routing usually results in repeated modifications. A pipe routing algorithm for automatic generation of pipe routes in a rotational space of an aero-engine is proposed. It formulates the aero-engine pipe routing problem as searching for a scanning circle’s moving trajectories while meeting certain engineering rules. According to the routing space, the cylindrical coordinate system is adopted to describe the routing space, and trajectory framework is constructed to restrict the scanning circle’s movements. Subsequently, an engineering rule-based pipe routing algorithm is developed to lead the scanning circle to targets, and an obstacle contour-expansion method is further proposed for the scanning circle to bypass obstacles. The algorithm requires less memory space and has fast search speed. And, it is more general since it is designed for the rotational spaces. Finally, numerical computations of pipe routing examples demonstrate the feasibility and efficiency of the algorithm.

Key words: Aeroengines, Pipe cables, Routing, Tandem cross-rolling Seamless steel tube Shortened processing Stream function