Abstract:
Manufacturing industry is a rapid developing area
and requires new technologies and concepts to increase the profit
margin through high production rate and high quality. To have a
sufficient and higher production rate there should be competent
fixturing systems, because fixtures perform major tasks such as
locating, holding and supporting components during
manufacturing processes. Due to the large variety of the
components manufactured in the industry, the fixture systems
differ from one another. Therefore dedicated fixtures are widely
used in the industry. Aerospace and automotive industries are
facing problems such as huge space allocation for large number
of dedicated fixtures, long lead time for designing and fabricating
and low flexibility to change the setup at the modifications of the
design. These problems cause to increase the overall cost and
slow down the production. A reconfigurable or modular fixture
can be introduced as a single fixture for set of components.
Although it reduces the number of fixtures, leads to other issues
such as high knowledge and skills required to change the setup
and inadaptability with robot cells and flexible manufacturing
systems because of human involvements. Flexible fixtures can be
used to minimize the problems associated with irregular shaped
components. This paper discusses proposed solutions of an
ongoing project on flexible fixturing system for handling
irregular shaped components. Alternative concepts introduced in
the paper are flexible and reconfigurable. Therefore they can be
applied to industries such as aerospace, automotive, stamping
and ship building.
