Simulation of the Wing-to-Fuselage Assembly Process

Abstract

The paper presents a simulation of the Airbus A350-900 wing-to-fuselage assembly process. The latter is a complex multistage process where the compliant parts are being joined by riveting. The current research analyzes the quality of the temporary fastener arrangement. The fastener arrangement is being checked to ensure that the residual gap between joined parts is small, and the fastener loads closing the gap are calculated. The deviations of the part shape from nominal are modeled via initial gaps. A cloud of initial gaps is generated based on the statistical analysis of the available measurements assuming the stochastic nature of local gap roughness. Through the reduction of the corresponding contact problem to a quadratic programming (QP) problem and the use of efficient QP algorithms together with the task-level parallelism, the mass contact problem solving on refined grids is accomplished.