Research On Virtual Assembly Technology Of Ship Block

Block assembly is an important part of ship manufacturing, the assembly time ofwhich has an important influence on the construction cycle of the whole ship. At present,assembly process design in shipbuilding enterprises is accomplished by the designpersonnel according to their accumulated knowledge and experience, lacks an effectivemethod to validate its feasibility. Therefore assembly process design is often not goodenough that in many situations the design must be adjusted during the assembly process,and this seriously affect the assembly schedule. Besides, traditional block assemblyprocess documents are unable to express complex assembly process clearly, which makesit hard for assemblers to understand the assembly operation method exactly. So thedocuments do not work well as guidance documents.Virtual assembly technology is an approach to solve the problems above. Theapplication of virtual assembly technology helps to achieve the visual simulation of theassembly process at the design phase, analyze the feasibility of assembly process design.Meanwhile assembly animations and3D block model gained from virtual assembly areused to generate3D assembly process document, which can present the information ofassembly process vividly and provide effective on-site assembly operation guidance toassemblers.This paper takes a double bottom block as the study object, makes a research on thevirtual assembly technologies of blocks and3D assembly process documents, the maincontents are as follow:(1) Based on the PPR HUB data structure of DELMIA, this paper created blockassembly process model. Specific work include creating block product structure tree,resource structure tree and process structure tree, setting the properties of product nodesand process nodes, and adding links between process nodes and related product nodes, resource nodes.(2) By using DELMIA, this paper simulates the detail movements of the part andresource models, accomplishes the planning of assembly sequence and path of the doublebottom block, realizes visualization of assembly process, and validates the feasibility ofassembly process design by collision and interference checking.(3) The assembly operation reachability and comfort are analyzed by usingergonomics technology.(4) The generation method of3D assembly process document is researched. Thispaper redevelops DELMIA to extract assembly process information from assemblyprocess model, uses3DVIA Composer to embed the3D block model into the document.Then the information, the3D block model and the assembly animations are integrated toform a visualized3D assembly process document.