ANALYZING THE NATURAL RESTING ASPECTS OF A COMPONENT FOR AUTOMATED ASSEMBLY

This paper proposes the construction of an energy envelope that can be used to advantage with the energy barrier method to analyse the natur al resting aspect of engineering parts destined for automatic assembly . Unlike the energy barrier method, the energy envelope does not requi re any visualization of the projection of the energy barrier on the as pect of interest. The energy envelope is the three-dimensional topolog y of the changes in height of the centroid, as the part attempts chang es of aspect. The paper describes how it may be computed in a CAD (com puter aided design) solid modeller. The results of applying the energy envelope to prisms of square and cylindrical cross-sections are the s ame as those predicted by the energy barrier method. When extended to the analysis of a rectangular prism, the results were consistent with Boothroyd's dynamic solution and Boothroyd's experimental data. This c onclusion is encouraging as there is no irrefutable evidence that the energy barrier method may be applied to the analysis of the rectangula r prism.