Development of hydraulic clamping tools for the machining of complex shape mechanical components

All markets revolve around quality and, regarding a big portion of the industry, factors such as productivity and profitability are crucial to the growth and sustainability of companies'. Processes need to be well thought to ensure process repeatability and stability, particularly in machining through chipping. In order to allow this, it is necessary to perfectly define the process, machining sequence and to create physical and organizational tools that are less prone to error. Machine setup can encompass several machining errors which, sometimes, are difficult to detect using traditional control tools such as dimensional inspection. There are some cases in which the fmal product is faulty and it is difficult to trace the real root-causes. To avoid those errors, it is important to create easily tuneable tools which require minimal instruction to use and to create mechanisms which allow for flaw detection during production and not only during final inspection. This work will bring a chance to improve the machining processes of complex shaped mechanical components that present strong failure risks during the machine setup, through the development of a clamping tool, giving way to easier setup operations. (C) 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.