Study of Drilling and Riveting in Manufacturing Process

Drilling and riveting is one of the major manufacturing process in aerospace industry.

In the drilling and riveting process of a torque box, there are two structural components – the skin and the longeron, which will be bonded together through the process. The rivet pitch (spacing) and material thickness for each individual layer are given. Currently, most drilling and riveting process is done manually. After the top layer is drilled through, some debris will accumulate in the gap between the drilled layer and the layer below it.  Workers have to take the layers apart and clean up the debris before riveting. This is a time consuming work and is not efficient for manufacturing. Therefore, a new approach, which is more efficient in both cost and time, was proposed by Boeing. This approach is to use the automatic one-side drilling and riveting machine for manufacturing production. The automatic machine will apply pressure on the bushing of the drilling gun to hold the layers together so that debris will not accumulate between the drilled layer and the layer below it during the process. However, there is no idea about what is the best bushing shape and how much pressure force should be applied to eliminate the gap (or minimize the gap) between layers such that no debris lies between them. CSULB was funded by Boeing to study this problem.

The objective of this project is to develop an analysis technique with an optimization procedure to design the proper bushing shape and investigate the structural behavior of the bolted layers in torque box during the one-side drilling and riveting process.

H. P. Chen, “Nonlinear Structural Analysis of Hole Drilling on Super Panels,” Report AE-97-2 for Advanced Transport Aircraft Systems, Boeing, Long Beach, 1997.

H. P. Chen, “Bushing Shape Optimization for Hole Drilling in manufacturing Process,” Report AE-98-3 for Advanced Transport Aircraft Systems, Boeing, Long Beach, 1998.

Hsun Chen, “Drilling Study of C-17 Torque Box,” Report MDC 99K7040, 1999.