Design for Assembly: Part Orientation, Prediction and Demonstration

This paper reports efforts made in creating theoretical and computational methodologies and tools to predict percentage occurrences of final orientations of parts being dropped into feeders. The theoretical developments are based on the surface areas and the location of the center of gravity of a part without accounting for its elasticity while the computational developments, based on Finite Element Analysis, account for the deformation of a part, its material properties, dropping height, velocity, and dropping angle. The end results of this project are two separate software tools which can predict the percentage occurrence of different landing orientations. The tools enable a designer to manipulate dimensions and material properties of a part, so that it has a desired landing orientation