Vibration Assisted Drilling on Automated Drilling Units: Challenges, Dynamic Modelization and Prospective Developments

The Vibration Assisted Drilling (VAD) process has been implemented in Automated Drilling Equipment (ADE) on an industrial scale since 2011. Today more than 11000 ADEs are currently used on aircraft assembly lines. As well as drawing up a short report on the use of this new process, the authors make an assessment on new challenges that VAD has to face up. Indeed production rates are increasing and ADE manufacturers improve their technologies, one of the most recent and major development concerning the electrical motorization of the machines. These evolutions are as many opportunities for the VAD provided you have a clever understanding as well as an expert knowledge of the process. Thus the authors propose a new dynamic model of the whole VAD system which integrates the behavior of the part, cutting tool/material pair and the machine. The confrontation of model results and experimental validation tests demonstrates the relevance of the works. On this basis the authors detail some perspective of ADE process of tomorrow in terms of implementation technologies, parameters settings or even cutting tool optimization. They also show the interest of a smart connection between this new model and the Mitis database which is fed for ten years by monitored VAD tests.