Design and Development of Welding Fixture for Sheet Metal and Structural Steel Fabricated Parts : A Review

In this paper main focus is to study the various things to be take in consideration while designing a welding fixture for sheet metal parts Fixtures control the position and orientation of parts in an assembly process and thus significantly contribute to process capability that determines production yield and product quality. As a result, a number of approaches were developed to optimise a single- and multi-fixture assembly system with rigid (3-2-1 fixture layout) to deformable parts (N-2-1 fixture layout). These approaches aim at fixture layout optimisation of single ideal parts (as define by CAD model). However, as production yield and product quality are determined based on a production volume of real (non-ideal) parts. Thus, major challenges involving the design of a fixture layout for assembly of sheet metal parts can be enumerated into three categories: (1) non-ideal part consideration to emulate real part; (2) ‘N-2-1’locating scheme due to compliant nature of sheet metal parts; and, (3) batch of non-ideal parts to consider the production process error at design stage.