Towards Semi Automated Pre-assembly for Aircraft Interior Production

The growing aviation market puts first tier suppliers of aircraft interior under great pressure. Cabin monuments, not only consist of various assemblies with a wide range of parts, they are also highly customized by the airliners. Historically grown, poorly optimized manual processes offer the required flexibility, but limit the production rate of the individual products. The aviation industry responds with an increased use of automation technology. Recent standardization and automation approaches for efficient manufacturing, lead to an increase in productivity of these low volume products. However, complementary approaches to increase the degree of automation during assembly of aircraft interior components are missing. To reach a higher degree of automation this paper presents a derivation of cabin specific assembly processes with a varying degree of automation. First the range of components and processes in pre-assembly is analyzed with respect to automation. Based on the analysis, components and processes are classified in standardized groups. Fully automated and flexible automation processes are introduced to develop a semi-automated system. Furthermore, the required flow of information is described. Discussion of the results shows that the presented solution allows a flexible pre-assembly of low-volume interior parts and sets a baseline for further digitalization approaches.

Design of a Non-Contact Radial Torque Sensor with Variable Torque Range by Electromagnetic Coil Coupling with Piezoelectric Sensor

Recently, due to the development of automation technology, torque measuring and monitoring technologies have been brought to the focus. However, the commercially available sensors have the disadvantage of large volume, which results in the difficulty of installation on existing automated machines. Responding to the above-mentioned problem, a contactless torque sensor that uses an electromagnetic coil combined with a permanent magnet was proposed. By adjusting the input electric current in the coil, the strength of the magnetic field can be controlled to generate a non-contact magnetic force to resist external torque loading. For the measurement of such a magnetic force, a cantilever-beam mechanism comprising a piezoelectric-loading (PZT-L) sensor is employed to estimate the external static force by measuring the variation of the electric impedance. According to the measured results, the proposed PZT-L sensor demonstrates the accuracy of the proposed design, for which the maximum estimated error was around 6%. Finally, the proposed contactless torque sensor with 11 cm in diameter and 2 cm in thickness was employed to verify the effectiveness of theoretical analysis. From the sensor characteristic measurement, the detection range for external torque can be from 7.8 to 125.6 N-mm when the driven current input ranged from 2 to 10 A. Therefore, the experimental results presented that the moment of inertia via the resisted torque can be adjusted by the proposed non-contact torque-sensing system according to the measuring condition.