A Novel Reconfigurable Supporting Structure for Aircraft Maintenance Applications

Modern aerospace industries are continuously seeking novel technological solutions to survive in a highly volatile marketplace. The aerospace industry faces a number of difficulties such as minimizing cost, meeting challenging deadlines while maintaining safety. Currently, large volume, fixed position, dedicated supporting structures are used by the industry to accomplish assembly, maintenance and repair requirements. Manufacture of such dedicated supporting structures are expensive, difficult to use with different aircraft sizes, require long manufacturing lead times backed by a skilled workforce, and occupy large floor space during use. As a solution to above issues, there is a need for affordable, robust, and most importantly, reconfigurable aircraft supporting structures. These supporting structures should be reusable so that, it enhances the operational flexibility and reduces development cost. Reconfigurable supporting structures also provide easy system expandability, rapid response to production changes and considerable reduction to setup time. This research investigates required characteristics of such supporting structures for aerospace applications. Some predominant designs are highlighted from the literature which are based on nut and bolt mechanisms that are time consuming to setup and are vibratory unstable. The proposed design focuses on eliminating the nut and bolt joints to minimize the assembly and disassembly time. Hence the proposed design is novel "quick clamping" design for star joint mechanisms for use in reconfigurable supporting structures. The prototype is developed using 3D Computer Aided Design (CAD) software and is manufactured using widely available manufacturing processes.