Precise Compensation of Component Distortion by an Adaptive Clamping System

Due to the good corrosion behaviour and the high specific strength of titanium alloys, their ratio of the structural weight in modern aircraft developments reaches nearly 15 %. This is twice as much as in the last aircraft generations and leads to the applica-tion of large (> 3 m) structural titanium parts like door frames, lintel and sill beams. For these structural parts open die forgings are milled. Hereby, over 95% of the raw material is removed. The quenching process after forging induces residual stress into the forgings. Releasing the stress by removing material can lead to strong part distor-tion, especially by long and slender parts.

To ensure an economic and scrap free production of these large structural titanium components, a new adaptive clamping system for load-free clamping has been devel-oped to avoid a time-consuming manual adjustment before the finishing processes. In this paper the assembly of one adaptive clamping element and its experimental verifi-cation concerning distortion-free clamping is presented.