Design for verification

Abstract

Increased competition in the aerospace market has placed additional demands on aerospace manufacturers to reduce costs, increase product flexibility and improve manufacturing efficiency. There is a knowledge gap within the sphere of digital to physical dimensional verification and on how to successfully achieve dimensional specifications within real-world assembly factories that are subject to varying environmental conditions. This paper describes a novel Design for Verification (DfV) framework to be used within low rate and high value and complexity manufacturing industries to aid in achieving high productivity in assembly via the effective dimensional verification of large volume structures, during final assembly. The 'Design for Verification' framework has been developed to enable engineers to design and plan the effective dimensional verification of large volume, complex structures in order to reduce failure rates and end-product costs, improve process integrity and efficiency, optimise metrology processes, decrease tooling redundancy and increase product quality and conformance to specification. The theoretical elements of the DfV methods are outlined, together with their testing using industrial case studies of representative complexity. The industrial tests have proven that by using the new Design for Verification methods alongside the traditional 'Design for X' toolbox, resulted in improved tolerance analysis and synthesis, optimized large volume metrology and assembly processes and more cost effective tool and jig design.