Study of Drilling and Riveting in Manufacturing Process 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. 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. 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.