Development Of Styrofoam Automatic Implanting Systems For Honeycomb Structural Panel

Aluminum honeycomb panel has been widely used in aviation, aerospace, shipbuilding, architecture and other fields, due to its superior performance of high specific strength, high specific stiffness, heat and sound insulation, anti-fatigue and light weight, etc. Current manufacturing process of aluminum honeycomb panel relies mainly on manual operation, and therefore both efficiency and quality are extremely low. Consequently, the traditional way of manufacturing of honeycomb panel has seriously restricted the development of productivity. Hence, manufacturing automation is of significant importance for China’s aerospace development.In this paper, a design of an automatic system for implanting styrofoam into cells in aluminum honeycomb panel which is comprised of the rubber cutting mechanism, the end effector and the control system to realize the automation of foam filled is proposed. At first, the overall scheme design of the automatic system for implanting Styrofoam into cells in aluminum honeycomb panel was carried out on the basis of analysis of technical requirements combining with the traditional foam filling process. Then, according to the working principle of the overall scheme, the structure design of the cutting device and the end effector is carried out in detail. The styrofoam is air-cooled by a vortex tube refrigerator before being fed to cutting process with a steel belt. The end effector is comprised of the styrofoam transport device, the implantation head and the visual positioning device. In this paper, an industry robot with six degrees of freedom is used in the automatic system for implanting styrofoam into cells in aluminum honeycomb panel as the carrier of the end effector. The end effector can be placed on the hole-based position in aluminum honeycomb panel by using the industry robot. The tools which are settled on the manipulators possess some advantages in quickly moving, high precision and the large space of movement. A control system is developed to coordinate all the sub-systems for cutting, conveying and implanting, as well as the robot operating systems.In this study, extensive experiments have been carried out in order to verify the reliability and stability of this automatic implanting system. The experimental results indicate that the filling effects are very well for different kinds of cellular holes and the automatic implanting system can work continuously with good stability. The stability and reliability have been proved to meet the functional and technical requirements.