In the aerospace industry the monolithic structures have been introduced to reduce the costs of assembling large numbers of components. The expected benefit of using thin walled monolithic parts is given by a large reduction in the overall manufacturing costs, nevertheless this kind of component encounters a critical phase in fixturing.Fixtures are used to locate and hold workpieces during manufacturing. Because workpiece surface errors and fixture set-up errors (called source errors) always exist, the fixtured workpiece will consequently have position and/or orientation errors (called resultant errors) that will definitely affect the final machining accuracy. Most often the current clamping procedure is not straightforward, it implies several steps and the success of the operation hardly depends by the skill of the human operator. It is estimated that fixturing could constitute 10-20% of the total manufacturing costs, assuming that the fixtures are amortized over relatively small batches. Fixturing devices must satisfy two requisites, which, in some terms, are opposite:to provide relatively high forces in order to guarantee that the workpiece will be maintained in position under the maximum cutting forcesto reduce as much as possible strains induced in the workpiece.Limiting the strains induced in the workpiece is crucial because of elastic strain recovery: releasing the clamped workpiece would result in an unwanted final deformation.In this paper a novel adaptive fixturing based on active clamping forces (supplied by piezoelectric actuators) is presented: a real aerospace part case study, - a Nozzle Guide Vane (NGV) -, is introduced, the related problems are identified, and the adopted solutions shown.The proposed adaptive fixturing device can lead to the following advantages:to perform an automatic errors-free workpiece clamping and then drastically reduce the overall fixturing set up time;to recover unwanted strains induced to the workpiece, in order to limit the amplitude of elastic strain recovery;to perform active vibration control (AVC) in order to limit vibration effects induced by the cutting tool.Moreover the proposed device has been designed with the aim of obtaining a modular unit, reusable and applicable to different industrial applications.The paper describes the actuator/sensors selection criteria, the novel concept of the actuated clamping mechanism, the design steps and the related FE analysis.Finally a preliminary integrated mechatronic model able to reproduce (and predict) in closed-loop the basic case-study multifunctional features, within a virtual environment, is presented and the simulation results discussed.