Research And Development Of The Special Fixture Aided Design System

At present, the special fixture has a pivotal role in the machinery manufacturing industry.The quality of the special fixture directly affects the processing quality and productionefficiency of the products. The special fixture generally composed of hundreds of parts. It willmake a large number of design errors and rework in the processing of design and assembly,which reduce efficiency and increase the design cycle. Based on Pro/ENGINEER platform,the paper developed a special fixture aided design system by computer aided fixture design,which using secondary development tool and family table in Pro/ENGINEER and VisualStudio2003.In order to improve an engineering example for the special fixture aided design system,the paper does a special fixture design of the cylinder body about surface milling process.According to studying secondary development tool Pro/TOOLKIT in Pro/ENGINEER,understanding its work mode, basic process, objects and actions, object handle, programstructure and generalized string. It lays a theoretical foundation for development of the specialfixture aided design system.The special fixture aided design system is developed, which is composed by parametricdesign subsystem and components library subsystem. According to analysis the function ofparametric design subsystem and components library subsystem, produced their menus anddialog interfaces. Some nonlinear parts are modeled for the special fixture by family table.Components library are modeled by those parts. And the functions of parametric designsubsystem and components library subsystem are achieved by the program. Finally, combinedparametric design subsystem and components library subsystem, and finished thedevelopment of the special fixture aided design system. With an example, the special fixtureaided design system is used to do virtual assembly. And an animation which is the virtualassembly process is created.