Application of Flexible Fixturing to Aluminum and Composite Bonded Aerospace Structures

Development of improved fixturing is needed for prototype and small-production composite bonded assemblies. A flexible fixturing conceptual design is developed, which uses technologies including flexible fixturing and product family-based attachment features. The focus of this design is reduction of tooling cost, improvement of accuracy, adjustability, ability to account for part variation, and reduction of time spent recreating tooling in the event of design change. This design is analyzed using kinematic constraint software to inform the design. Improvements to the design are made as suggested by the analysis. This design is also modeled to determine its accuracy, and then tested in scale for both its accuracy and repeatability. The repeatability of the design developed is found to be high enough to support most aerospace applications with only minimal verification of the alignment. The technologies developed represent improvement over traditional hard tooling for this and similar applications.