Enhanced Pose Adjustment System for Wing-Box Assembly in Large Aircraft Manufacturing

Abstract Strict quality requirements in aircraft manufacturing demand high-accuracy pose adjustment systems. However, the pose alignment process of a large complex structure is also affected by thermal and gravity deformations to a great extent. Even though the pose adjustment system passes accuracy verification, the pose of the large complex structure remains challenging to smoothly and efficiently converge to the desired pose. To solve this problem, we developed a pose adjustment system enhanced by integrating physical simulation for the wing-box assembly of a large aircraft. First, the development of the pose adjustment system, which is the base of the digital pose alignment of a large aircraft’s outer wing panel, is demonstrated. Then, pose alignment principles of duplex and multiple assembly objects based on the best-fit strategy are successively explored. After that, contribution analysis is conducted for nonideal pose alignment. Immediately following, influences of thermal and gravity deformations simultaneously coexisting for the pose alignment are discussed. Finally, a physical simulation-assisted pose alignment method is developed considering multisource errors, which uses the finite element analysis to integrate temperature fluctuation and gravity field effects. Compared with a conventional digital pose adjustment system driven by the classical best-fit, deviations of the key characteristic points significantly decreased despite the impacts of thermal and gravity deformations. The enhanced pose adjustment system has been applied to large aircraft wing-box assembly. It provides an improved understanding of the pose alignment of large-scale complex structures.