Research On Virtual Assembly For Automobile Components

As a new manufacturing method and mode, Virtual Manufactuing (VM) has arousedwide concern in global manufacturing industry at the end of twentieth century. Based on thetechnology of computer simulation, the manufacturing process and the performance of theproducts can be simulated at the design stage, which help to predict the prime cost andmanufacturability of the product, thereby reducing the waste of resoures for production andimprove the development efficiency.Virtual assembly, which is a key part connecting the stages of design and manufacturingprocess of the product, is not only an important part of VM, but also the main source of costs.In practical process of engineering, the assembly of complex products still mainly dependson manual assembly, making assembly technology lag far behind the technologies of designand manufacture. In this paper, on the basis of computer simulation, the process of assemblywas optimized by improving the structure which makes the product more reasonable, so as toraise the efficiency and reducing the difficulty of assembly process. In addition, the assemblyquality of the product is also affected by the deviation of the assembled components. Thuswe introduced assembly variables into assembly system, analyzing the impact of deviation ofthe component on product’ shape and performance. The specific research of this paper is asfollows:Study on the technology used in the modeling and planning of assembly process,considering assemblability in product design stage. We use hybrid battery as the researchobject, analyzing characteristic of cell structure and the causes of the difficulty in assembling.A new assembly method is put forward, namely the hierarchical assembly method. Then thefeasibility of the method is verified by the simulation through DELMIA software. Comparedthe assembly time of the original battery with that of hierarchical method, the new methodimproves the assembly efficiency and reduces the assembly difficulty.Study on the effects of the flexibility of parts on final assembly deformation. Afterdiscussing the theory of compliant part deviation, the compliant part tolerance analysis canbe devided into four steps: place, clamp, fasten and release. Then the modeling method ofeach step is also discussed. The assembly deformation sheet metal is simulated as anexample by Catia TAA module. Finally the deformation of the compliant part due toassembling process was obtained. According to the simulation result, the appropriateparameters can be under control at the initial design stage, which is helpful to reduceassembly cost and production time.Investigation on the effect of tolerance on the assembly performance, building thetolerance co-simulation platform, which effectively combines the multi-body dynamics software Adams and multi-objective optimization software modeFRONTIER. The automaticanalysis of assembly tolerance is realized, breaking through the conventional toleranceanalysis software which can only analyze the dimensional tolerances. By using the toleranceanalysis in this paper, the problem related to the force and torque can be solved. The controlswitch of car headlight is used as an example to verify the feasibility of the platform, If theinitial simulation results do not meet the design requirements, reasonably adjustment of thehighest impact factor of tolerance parameters and re-simulation is needed, to obtain the idealdesign plan.