Client:
Our customer designs and delivers manufacturing technology solutions. They are offering automation solutions, such as material handling, vision-guided robotics, direct part marking, supervisory control, and assembly stations to automotive, pharmaceutical, food, beverage, and aerospace industries.
Scope:
The scope is to design a testing fixture for an automotive vehicle’s lamp assembly to perform the leak test and to design a mechanism to mount the part marking equipment.
Why APA?
APA has around 8 years of experience in the design of automation equipment, fixtures, assembly line automation, work stations/work cells, and EOAT (End Of Arm Tools).
Design Challenges involved:
The challenge was to avoid touching the aesthetic glass cover to arrest all the 6 degrees of freedom. We cautiously used the non-aesthetic region to hold the lamp.
Design process:
- Deciding the clamping and nesting locations.
- Arresting all the degrees of freedom of the lamp by using pneumatic power clamps, swing clamps, and nests.
- Using Delrin material for nests to avoid any marks on the lamp.
- Designing different hole positions and hole sizes for assembly process Poka-Yoke.
- Incorporating the sensors to check the presence of the lamp.
- Adding push-pull mechanism for all the nests (except the parent nest) for adjustability during the assembly process
- Performing sizing calculations to select swing clamps, and power clamps.
- Optimizing all the components within the provided fixture base plate
- Preparing part drawings, assembly drawings, and Bill of Materials.
Value delivered:
- We have performed sizing calculations of long-lead items such as pneumatic power clamps and swing clamps, and get the confirmation from the respective manufacturers during the initial stage of design completion. This helped to speed up the construction schedule.
- APA Engineering is an “On-Demand Extended Design house” for our client. Design cost was just 40 % when compared to onshore.
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