Digital Twin-driven machining process for thin-walled part manufacturing

Thin-walled parts are widely used in the aerospace, shipbuilding, and automotive industry, but due to its unique structure and high accuracy requirements, which leads to an increase in scrapped parts, high cost in production, and a more extended period in the trial machining process. However, to adapt to fast production cycles and increase the efficiency of thin-walled parts machining, this paper presents a Digital Twin-driven thin-walled part manufacturing framework to allow the machine operator to manage the product changes, make the start-up phases faster and more accurate. The framework has three parts: preparation, machining, and measurement, driven by Digital Twin technologies in detail. By establishing and updating the workpiece Digital Twin under a different status, various manufacturing information and data can be integrated and available to machine operators and other Digital Twins. It can serve as a guideline for establishing the machine tool and workpiece Digital Twin and integrating them into the machining process. It provides the machine operator opportunities to interact with both the physical manufacturing process and its digital data in real-time. The digital representation of the physical process can support them to manage the trial machining from different aspects. In addition, a demonstrative case study is presented to explain the implementation of this framework in a real manufacturing environment.     

LearningADD: Machine learning based acoustic defect detection in factory automation

Defect inspection of glass bottles in the beverage industrial is of significance to prevent unexpected losses caused by the damage of bottles during manufacturing and transporting. The commonly used manual methods suffer from inefficiency, excessive space consumption, and beverage wastes after filling. To replace the manual operations in the pre-filling detection with improved efficiency and reduced costs, this paper proposes a machine learning based Acoustic Defect Detection (LearningADD) system. Moreover, to realize scalable deployment on edge and cloud computing platforms, deployment strategies especially partitioning and allocation of functionalities need to be compared and optimized under realistic constraints such as latency, complexity, and capacity of the platforms. In particular, to distinguish the defects in glass bottles efficiently, the improved Hilbert-Huang transform (HHT) is employed to extend the extracted feature sets, and then Shuffled Frog Leaping Algorithm (SFLA) based feature selection is applied to optimize the feature sets. Five deployment strategies are quantitatively compared to optimize real-time performances based on the constraints measured from a real edge and cloud environment. The LearningADD algorithms are validated by the datasets from a real-life beverage factory, and the F-measure of the system reaches 98.48 %. The proposed deployment strategies are verified by experiments on private cloud platforms, which shows that the Distributed Heavy Edge deployment outperforms other strategies, benefited from the parallel computing and edge computing, where the Defect Detection Time for one bottle is less than 2.061 s in 99 % probability.     

Intelligent tool wear monitoring based on parallel residual and stacked bidirectional long short-term memory network

Effective tool wear monitoring (TWM) is essential for accurately assessing the degree of tool wear and for timely preventive maintenance. Existing data-driven monitoring methods mainly rely on complex feature engineering, which reduces the monitoring efficiency. This paper proposes a novel TWM model based on a parallel residual and stacked bidirectional long short-term memory (PRes–SBiLSTM) network. First, a parallel residual network (PResNet) is used to extract the multi-scale local features of sensor signals adaptively. Subsequently, a stacked bidirectional long short-term memory (SBiLSTM) network is used to obtain the time-series features related to the tool wear characteristics. Finally, the predicted tool wear value is outputted through a fully connected network. A smoothing correction method is applied to improve the prediction accuracy. The proposed model is experimentally verified to have a high prediction accuracy without sacrificing its generalization ability. A TWM system framework based on the PRes–SBiLSTM network is proposed, which has a certain reference value for TWM in actual industrial environments.     

A novel data-driven approach to support decision-making during production scale-up of assembly systems

In today's manufacturing settings, a sudden increase in the customer demand may enforce manufacturers to alter their manufacturing systems either by adding new resources or changing the layout within a restricted time frame. Without an appropriate strategy to handle this transition to higher volume, manufacturers risk losing their market competitiveness. The subjective experience-based ad-hoc procedures existing in the industrial domain are insufficient to support the transition to a higher volume, thereby necessitating a new approach where the scale-up can be realised in a timely, systematic manner. This research study aims to fulfill this gap by proposing a novel Data-Driven Scale-up Model, known as DDSM, that builds upon kinematic and Discrete-Event Simulation (DES) models. These models are further enhanced by historical production data and knowledge representation techniques. The DDSM approach identifies the near-optimal production system configurations that meet the new customer demand using an iterative design process across two distinct levels, namely the workstation and system levels. At the workstation level, a set of potential workstation configurations are identified by utilising the knowledge mapping between product, process, resource and resource attribute domains. Workstation design data of selected configurations are streamlined into a common data model that is accessed at the system level where DES software and a multi-objective Genetic Algorithm (GA) are used to support decision-making activities by identifying potential system configurations that provide optimum scale-up Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). For the optimisation study, two conflicting objectives: scale-up cost and production throughput are considered. The approach is employed in a battery module assembly pilot line that requires structural modifications to meet the surge in the demand of electric vehicle powertrains. The pilot line is located at the Warwick Manufacturing Group, University of Warwick, where the production data is captured to initiate and validate the workstation models. Conclusively, it is ascertained by experts that the approach is found useful to support the selection of suitable system configuration and design with significant savings in time, cost and effort.     

Framework and deployment of a cloud-based advanced planning and scheduling system

Many small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises (SMEs) have already implemented enterprise resource planning (ERP) and manufacturing execution system (MES) and began to start the journey of cloud manufacturing; however, the high cost of hardware and software investment, implementation, and maintenance usually hinder SMEs from adopting an advanced planning and scheduling (APS) system. This paper aims to develop a cloud-based APS (C-APS) system framework, the service structure, and approach of deploying the C-APS system in a public cloud infrastructure platform and service provider or hybrid cloud platform. The package diagram is proposed for building the C-APS system's virtual factory model to improve modeling efficiency and data stability. The C-APS system is a cloud-based and object-oriented software; its simulation-based scheduling engine can generate the significant production and operations schedule, and has the characteristics of on-demand self-service, quickly expanding and adjusting to the virtual plant model. The C-APS system's application in a leading automotive part assembly company's printed circuit board production scheduling shows that the input planning data model is easy to maintain. The scheduling quality is high; the computing time is short and acceptable for practical application.     

Accurate positioning of a drilling and riveting cell for aircraft assembly

Modern aircraft assembly demands assembly cells or machines with higher machining efficiency and accuracy. Thus, a dual-machine drilling and riveting cell is developed in this paper. We firstly discuss its physical design, as well as the automatic drilling and riveting process. With the automatic drilling and riveting cell, drilling and riveting production line of aircraft panels can be expected. The frame chain of the drilling and riveting cell is constructed to link the assembly cell to its task space, which is the kinematics base. System calibrations, including task space calibration, the sensor calibration of an orientation alignment unit, the floating calibration of the implicit hand-eye relationship, are explored. For high positioning accuracy, a multi-sensor servoing method is proposed for cell positioning. An orientation-based laser servoing strategy, which uses the feedback of the orientation errors measured by laser displacement sensors, is used to align drilling direction and camera shooting direction. Besides, A single-camera-based visual servoing is applied to align the tool center point (TCP) to reference holes, to obtain their coordinates for drilling position modification. Experiments of multi-sensor servoing for cell positioning are performed on an automatic drilling and riveting machine developed for the panel assembly of an aircraft in China. With the cell positioning method, the automatic drilling and riveting cell can approximately achieve an accuracy of 0.05 mm, which can adequately fulfill the requirement for the assembly of the aircraft.     

A differential transformer-based force sensor utilizing a magnetic fluid core

Microsystem Technologies - A force sensor utilizing a transformer concept with a ferrofluid core was developed. A ferrofluid reservoir was machined out of Teflon and the open top of the reservoir...     

ACS运动控制器运动实时暂停功能的实现方法

提出了一种ACS运动控制器运动实时暂停功能的实现方法。该方法通过将大的程序段按时间细分成细小段轨迹运动程序,然后在各细小段轨迹运动程序之间加入条件控制语句,使各细小轨迹运动程序段逐条载入到运动命令队列中,从而有效控制整个程序的运行,实现运动实时暂停功能。该方法已在基于ACS运动控制器的卷簧机数控系统中得到应用,取得了理想的运动实时暂停效果,且未出现明显的累积误差。     

工矿供电系统谐波治理新方法研究

针对现有无源滤波器滤波效果较差,易出现谐振过电压、谐波放大等现象的问题,提出一种基于基波谐振原理的谐波治理新方法。该方法在电网与无源滤波器之间的三相线路中分别串联一组由电感和电容组成的基波谐振电路,迫使谐波电流最大限度地流入无源滤波器,从而大幅提升滤波器的效率。实验结果表明,增加基波谐振电路后,电流畸变率从10.6%下降为0.942%,滤波效果更佳。     

Gain‐scheduled dynamic output feedback control for discrete‐time LPV systems

This paper presents synthesis conditions for the design of gain‐scheduled dynamic output feedback controllers for discrete‐time linear parameter‐varying systems. The state‐space matrix representation of the plant and of the controller can have a homogeneous polynomial dependency of arbitrary degree on the scheduling parameter. As an immediate extension, conditions for the synthesis of a multiobjective ??_∞ and ??₂ gain‐scheduled dynamic feedback controller are also provided. The scheduling parameters vary inside a polytope and are assumed to be a priori unknown, but measured in real‐time. If bounds on the rate of parameter variation are known, they can be taken into account, providing less conservative results. The geometric properties of the uncertainty domain are exploited to derive finite sets of linear matrix inequalities based on the existence of a homogeneous polynomially parameter‐dependent Lyapunov function. An application of the control design to a realistic engineering problem illustrates the benefits of the proposed approach. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.