• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.24 no.4 s.175
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• pp.811-823
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• 2000

In design and manufacturing airframe structures which are composed of a lot of sub-assemblies and large complex profile shapes it is difficult to reduce so called hardware variations. Accordingly cost increasing factors for manufacturing airframe parts are much more than other machine parts because of the variability of fabricated details and assemlies. To improve cost and quality, accurate assembly methods and DPD techniques are proposed in this paper which are based upon using CAD/CAM techniques, the concept of KC's and the coordinated datum and index throughout the design, tooling, manufacturing and inspection. The proposed methods are applied to produce fuselage frame assemblies and related engineering aspects are described regarding the design of parts and tools in the context of concurrent digital definition. First articles and consequent mass production of frame assemblies shows a great improvement of the process capability ratio from 0.7 by the past processes to 1.0 by the proposed methods in addition to the cost reduction due to the less number of tools, reduced total assembly times and the space compaction needed by massive inventory. The need to achieve better Cpk, however, and future studies to be investigated will be addressed briefly.