Research On Intelligent Design Key Technologies And Packages Development For Aircraft Assembly Tooling

Aircraft assembly tooling design is restricted by product design, tooling process, manufacture and usage, and has been the bottleneck of rapid aircraft production preparation. It is urgent issue to improve efficiency, collaboration and responsiveness to product change of assembly tooling design and reduce the iteration between tooling design and manufacture. First, assembly tooling design is required to be concurrent with product design, and frequent change activities of aircraft design lead to variance in assembly tooling design. Second, assembly tooling design needs be parallel with manufacture, and some tooling components have been made with the same time of tooling design. As the result, some rest parts and structures of assembly tooling become more complicated. Third, assembly tooling design is short of support from methods and software concerned with design tasks planning and knowledge driven design, and quality and efficiency of assembly tooling design depend on desigers'experience. The dissertation focuses on the key problems of assembly tooling process, including tasks planning phase, conceptual design phase, detailed design phase and design change phase. The research achievements include:1) By complementing one another with the advantages of design structure matrix and polychromatic sets, a new design process model based on synchronous mapping from weighted directed graph to design structure matrix and polychromatic sets is presented. The model integrates the related information including design process analysis and reconfiguration, task distribution and schedule, so it improves the efficiency and accuracy of process planning.2) A conceptual design model for aircraft assembly tooling is proposed. A layout design algorithm based on logical component is brought forward in the model, that is, rational situation of fame element is worked out by evolution computation of anchor-point level, frame-element level and tooling-level in turn. The locatable, rigidity, maneuverability and ergonomics are fully considered, thus design iteration is decreased greatly. 3) In order to reduce complexity and multiplicity in product design knowledge constraints, a new constraint classification strategy is adopted. Furthermore, a solving algorithm for knowledge constraint equation group is presented to deal with complex constraint types. By simplifying and standardizing equation group and converting nonlinear problem into linear one, the algorithm provides a simple and feasible approach to solve complicated knowledge constraints, thus human-computer interaction and dependence on experience are reduced greatly.4) A variant design model is presented to associate assembly tooling design with aircraft structure change. In this model, variant design is realized by top-down and bottom-up operations among the five layers which are master geometry layer, original control geometry layer, derivative control geometry layer, part layer and design base library layer. Due to the response mechanism, the modification design of assembly tooling with the aircraft design change is realized and it improves the efficency of assembly tooling design.5) An intelligent design software package for aircraft assembly tooling is developed based on the above research work. The package supports the main design process of assembly tooling design effectively and has been used in the design of three-type assembly tooling. The application has proved the package can meet the needs of rapid and intelligent design of aircraft assembly tooling.