Computer aided fixture design

VI COMPUTER AIDED FIXTURE DESIGN (Ph.D Thesis) Ulvi ŞEKER GAZI UNIVERSITY INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY FEBRUARY-1995 ABSTRACT The main purpose of a fixture is to locate the work part quickly and accurately, support it properly and hold securely, thereby ensuring that all parts produced in the same fixture will come out a like within specified tolerances. The conventional design of the fixture depend on the knowledge and experience of a domain expert. However, in the computer aided design, the expert programmes replace expert people. These programmes called as "Expert Systems", by collecting, compiling and interpreting the source information related with the domain, provide that the people who have less experience are able to design the fixtures. In this study, an expert system named as US-BKT has been devoloped, which can cary out the design of fixtures that are used for milling of prismatic components. In the establishment of the system, the modüler fixturing technique which is more convenient for flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) has been used. For this objective, the knowledge base of expert system has been constituted by using the modular fixture elements of WDS Wharton Ltd. Co. The US-BKT has been developed in the capable form which can achieve two dimensional (2D) fixture configuration from the two dimensional production drawing that belongs to work part which has been drawn in CAD environment. The Expert System has the feature recognition function is in the structure capable of extracting the manufacturing feature information from production drawing. Quiet satisfactory results have been obtaines from several samples. Key Words : Jigs and Fixture Design, Modular Fixturing, Computer Aided Fixture Design (CAFD), Expert Systems (ES) Scientific Code : 625.02.07/225.05.01 Number of Pages : 148 Supervisor : Prof.Dr. Eres SÖYLEMEZ