Development of intelligent reconfigurable welding fixture for rail car manufacturing industry

Abstract

Dedicated welding fixtures are used in the railcar manufacturing industry to fix and stabilise the welded components during the welding assembly process in order to achieve the highest possible accuracy and repeatability of connected components. In the railcar manufacturing industries, the use of dedicated welding fixtures results in longer production setup, high manufacturing cost, low quality standards and storage issues. In order to reduce cost, increase productivity and meet the market demands, there is a growing requirement for the tools to be flexible, reconfigurable and re-constructible. The purpose of this study is to offer a unique intelligent reconfigurable welding fixture (IRWF) that addresses the current challenges encountered by the railcar manufacturing industry when using dedicated fixtures. Functional requirements such as reconfigurability, intelligence, assembly, manufacturability and maintainability were considered during the development of an IRWF. The structural integrity of the design was analysed using numerical calculations to quantify the effectiveness of the fixture during welding and was found to be sufficient. The IRWF was then manufactured and the control systems were then incorporated to ensure fully automation of the fixture using the control panel with integrated Programmable Logic Control (PLC).