| Modern industrial products require better appearance, higher degree of functionalintegration and more frequent product update, and hence bring higher requirements onclearance control in assembly process. To meet the requirements of product appearance, theclearance of each appearance parts should be as small as possible after assembling; theincreased product function integration need a more tight control on the assembly clearances ofinternal structure parts and their distance in the movement to avoid interference. At present,clearance control in household appliances industry has achieve to millimeter level, clearancemanagement and validation has become the bottleneck of the detailed design phase. Frequentdesign modifications require a large amount of clearance rechecks, which brings a heavyburden to designers. Most CAD software mainly concern about interference, cannot provideaccurate interference distance information, so trial-and-error revise is necessary to find areasonable clearance between moving parts. The research on interference detection andclearance management technique and its application in industrial will improve assemblyefficiency, optimize product design and reduce manufacturing costs. This conditionersclearance control system is supported by Zhuhai Gree electric appliance company.This project is focused on its application in the air conditioning industry. An efficientclearance control software is developed based on the analysis of clearance controlrequirements in the air conditioning product design. The Pro/Toolkit API is used fordeveloping a Pro/E based program.Main contents of this article are as follows:1．Summarize and analyze the clearance control requirements in the process of structuredesigning of air conditioning product. The main framework of an assembly clearance checksystem is proposed on this analysis. Some function modules for different product designstages are defined, including the clearance definition, clearance reporting, and visualinspection. The conceptual design and the related development techniques of these models areintroduced for the Pro/ENGINEER platform. 2．An algorithm of interference distance detection and interval optimization is proposedto optimize parts locations on the premise of meeting clearance requirement and making thelayout more compact. Penetration distance calculated in this algorithm provides a moreaccurate reference for clearance control, and can be applied to the dynamic clearance control.3．The distribution of manufacturing tolerances of related parts is studied to make themanufacturing tolerances more reasonable on the premise that the designed assemblyclearance requirements can be satisfied. Based on statistical tolerance method, a2D tolerancedistribution algorithm is proposed. The calculation results showed that this algorithm had abetter manufacturing tolerances distribution than traditional methods.4．The clearance controlling system is developed on Visual studio2010using Pro/Toolkit,a C++API to seamlessly integrate third-part programs into Pro/E Creo Platform2.0. Theimplementation of system in the air conditioning industry demonstrated that this system canefficiently complete the tasks of clearance definition, automatic output of clearance checklist,automatic monitoring of clearance changes and visualized review, greatly improved theefficiency of product development and design. |
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