Analysis and investigation of a rivet feeding tube in an aircraft automatic drilling and riveting system

摘要

The autoassembly system based on an automatic drilling and riveting technology is efficient for a long lifetime and high-reliability design of modern aircrafts. The automatic feeding of the rivet plays an important role in ensuring the system reliability. This paper focuses on the design of the rivet feeding tube to improve the system reliability by decreasing or even preventing the rivet jamming. The main factors that influence the rivet transport in the tube were analyzed. To avoid the rivet jamming, an analytical method was suggested to evaluate the tube's minimum bending radius, minimum interior diameter, and lowest inlet air pressure. To verify the analytical model, the finite element simulation and experiment were carried out to study the transportation process of the rivet in the tube. The result shows that the model presented in this paper can satisfactorily offer theoretical proof for the optimization of the rivet feeding tube.