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Design for assembly is the concept of carrying out critical thought early in the design stage to create assembly easement at the production stage. In the aerospace industry, products have very long lives, frequently being optimised rather than introducing new products. This has meant older products, which are stable income generators, have not benefited from the latest design for assembly methods and manufacturing technology suffers from obsolescence. It has been established that a large percentage of overall product cost is determined at the design stage; thus, existing products suffer from preloaded costs. This paper takes existing design for assembly methodologies and analyses them with respect to the unique challenges involved in legacy product redesign. Several novel factors that contribute to redesign analysis are identified such obsolescence impact and a holistic operation difficulty assessment. A tool is developed to identify potential redesign for assembly projects. The tool is demonstrated through the application of real data and comparing against business decisions. The tool was found to provide a strong indication of where profitable projects may be launched.

ABSTRACT:When using any optical measurement system one important factor to consider is the placement of the sensors in relation to the workpiece being measured. When making decisions on sensor placement compromises are necessary in selecting the best placement based on the shape and size of the object of interest and the desired resolution and accuracy. One such compromise is in the distance the sensors are placed from the measurement surface, where a smaller distance gives a higher spatial resolution and local accuracy and a greater distance reduces the number of measurements necessary to cover a large area reducing the build-up of errors between measurements and increasing global accuracy. This paper proposes a photogrammetric approach whereby a number of sensors on a continuously flexible mobile platform are used to obtain local measurements while the position of the sensors is determined by a 6DoF tracking solution and the results combined to give a single set of measurement data within a continuous global coordinate system. The ability of this approach to achieve both high accuracy measurement and give results over a large volume is then tested and areas of weakness to be improved upon are identified.

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