Fixture Configuration Design for Sheet Metal Laser Welding With a Two-Stage Response Surface Methodology

Abstract

Abstract In this paper a two-stage response surface methodology is developed for the robust fixture configuration design of sheet metal laser welding. The first stage is to optimally determine the Robust Design Space (RDS) where the relatively less-sensitive design over the entire feasible design space can be obtained. A weighted objective function combining both robustness and performance are taken in this stage. The degree of metal fit-up is taken as performance characteristic. Within RDS a second-order response surface model is fitted by a 3k fractional factorial design in the second stage. Thus, based on the new methodology the robust design results under the new fixturing scheme can be obtained. Illustrative example shows that the presented method can lead to a robust fixturing scheme and the influential design locators can be detected.