Principal Investigator Martin Culpepper
In this project, we incorporated compliant fixture elements into a Ford Duratec six-cylinder, 2.3-liter engine. The fixtures are designed to plastically comply when first mate, thereby forming themselves for a precision fit. The fixtures achieve 250 nm repeatability, far in excess of state-of-the-art precision fixtures. Through this work, we have reduced the cost of internal precision alignment features/fixtures by 40 percent and improved performance/repeatability by a factor of 20.