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The thesis is aimed at improving the welding productivity of a special-shaped aircraft oil collector. Because of the complex structure of the oil collector, the manufacturing process requires manual adjustment for groups of fixtures, and then the thin circular components are welded together by TIG (Tungsten Inert-Gas) welding. This process leads to the low productivity of the oil collector, and the quality is difficult to maintain. Therefore, this thesis proposes an automatic fixture with hydraulic driving system to replace the manual fixtures for reducing process time of oil collector and maintaining stable production quality. The developed automatic fixtures is to use a hydraulic system to drive the wedge blocks outward to form a cylindrical and conic shapes, which can firmly contact with the thin welding components. Therefore, after the welding process, the oil collector can maintain its cylindrical and conic shapes. In addition, the fixture is designed with internal gas flow channels and with a flow rate regulation function so that the inert argon gas flow can be well guided and the welding position can be effectively protected. The developing processes of the automatic fixture include mechanical design, finite element analysis, fabrication, systems integration, process planning, and performance verification. An on-site performance examination was performed by using the assembled automatic fixture. As a result, the developed automatic fixture might reduce the processing time of an oil collector from current 45 minutes to 30 minutes with productivity improvement of 33.3%. The effectiveness of the proposed automatic fixture was demonstrated. The results obtained in this these can be applied to the welding devices with thin and specially-shaped components.
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