Constraint-based virtual assembly training system for aircraft engine

Abstract

This paper describes a novel virtual assembly training system for aircraft engine. Today, the assembly training is mainly performed by existing paper documents or accessing to electronic manuals. It is difficult to adapt to increasingly complex aircraft engine maintenance requirements. A modern aircraft engine is a typical multi-disciplinary, multi-component and strongly coupled complex mechanical system, its high maintenance costs and complexity of assembly make higher requirements for maintenance staff. To solve this problem, we design and implement a virtual assembly training system of turbojet 7-B aircraft engine. The system defines a constraint-based assembly process with a collision detection algorithm to check interactions, whose execution time shows that the algorithm can satisfy the requirements of real-time virtual assembly. Therefore, through human-computer interaction, the tools and parts are utilized under the limitation of the degrees of freedom (DOF) to complete moving like the axial translation, axial spiral and other movement, enabling the virtual assembly process and the actual assembly process are unified. Besides, we integrate haptic equipment to get force feedback to replace two-dimensional IO device. © 2012 Springer-Verlag GmbH.