Design & Development of Rotary Fixture for CNC with Computer Aided Mass Balancing Method as Pre-mortem Tool

Abstract

Various areas related to fixture are already described by renowned authors, but still there is an urgent need to apply all these research works to an industrial application. This paper presents design and development of rotary fixture for machining real industrial component - Flow TEE body of petroleum refinery. Actually HMC is the best solution for performing the required operations, but HMC costs around 12.5 million rupees whereas CNC turning centre costs only about 2.5 million rupees. Here the research work of this paper is proved. A fixture is designed & manufactured, which helps to accomplish required machining operations on CNC turning centre and hence 10 million rupees are saved in installation cost. Methodology for mass balance of rotary fixture developed by investigators mostly act as post-mortem tool; calculating unbalanced mass after fixture is manufactured. In the present work, a pre-mortem tool is developed to predict unbalanced mass well before manufacturing. The present research work also proposes three alternate methods for mass balancing of rotary fixture using Pro/Mechanism. Analytical analysis under dynamic machining is also covered. Fixture not only being designed and mass balanced, but manufactured also; this paper sets the classical example of design for manufacturing.