Fast Reconfigurable Fixture Design

Manufacturing companies in the 21s' century will face unpredictable,high-frequency market changes driven by global competition. The continuous changes of market require a rapid change of product varieties in order to meet the market demands. Recent surveys have showed that, rapid reconfigurable manufacturing systems(RRMS) whose components are reconfigurable machines and reconfigurable controllers, are the cornerstones of this new manufacturing paradigm. RRMS is also suitable to our country. After reconfiguration manufacturing system puts new requirements on fixture design, an important component of the traditional manufacturing system, so that the fixture design becomes a key problem in RMS. In this paper a series of solutions have been proposed for the fixture design.The development of manufacturing systems and fixtures has been described. The concept of the "fixture" based on the research of reconfiguability and suitable for RMS has been presented. The relation and the difference between a fixture in RMS and conventional fixture has been analyzed. The category of fixture element and fixture unit for RMS has also been studied.According to the performance of RMS and its demand on fixture, a general fixture design process of RMS can be divided into three phases: fixture planning (including locating and clamping) based on the features of work-piece ; fixture unit design in concept design and fixture configuration in detailed design.Groupware Module is the core and base of Reconfigurable Fixture Component/Element Library. A interactive reconfigurable fixture design system has been developed based on this buding of a fixture elements library. SolidWorks and Visual Basic are software platforms for this system. The elements can be reconfigure, reform and design as soon as the product be designing. Users can append ,delete and modify the fixture element library according to specific demands. The parametrization function enables the model to represent more than one fixture elements which have similar shapes but different sizes.At last, the demonstrating of theory and the result of my program, the principle and methods are true and feasible for RRMS.