One-Way Assembly Sensor-based digital verification -Technology accelerator – Phase 1 (OWAST)

Traditional methods of airframe assembly are manually-intensive and inefficient.

After components are placed together and drilled, they are disassembled, inspected and reworked before being reassembled and joined with fasteners.

This is due to assembly fit-up, materials and dynamics, along with quality and rate requirements, making hole generation challenging.

This project will develop a scaled-down test-rig, which can mimic dynamics of production assemblies, and techniques for inferring hole quality from in-process data. Outputs will facilitate hole generation testing and hole verification using in-process data.

This will enable adoption of assembly processes without intermediate disassembly, drastically improving aircraft assembly efficiency.