Mechanical Assemblies: their Design, Manufacture, and Role in Product Development

Citation

Lilly, B. (2006), "Mechanical Assemblies: their Design, Manufacture, and Role in Product Development", Assembly Automation, Vol. 26 No. 2, pp. 167-167. https://doi.org/10.1108/aa.2006.26.2.167.1

Daniel Whitney of MIT's Draper Labs has written what is likely to be the standard reference work on Mechanical Assemblies for many years to come. This comprehensive text covers every aspect of assembly in detail, from the tolerancing of individual components to the design and economics of assembly systems and workstations, and includes numerous case studies to assist the reader in applying the tools and techniques presented in the text.

The unique strength of this book lies in the fact that Whitney grounds the topic of assemblies and assembly operations in the context of product design, beginning with a discussion of functional requirements and design constraints. He then carries the concepts through the entire process, showing how the design of the assembly itself impacts the closely related issues of product architecture and the design of the assembly line or workstation that will fabricate the product. Mechanical Assemblies should be on the bookshelf of every product designer and manufacturing engineer who deal with complex assembly operations.

The first third of the book is devoted to the design of assemblies. Whitney leads the student through the process of determining the functional requirements for the assembly, developing the kinematic constraints, and applying screw theory both to represent and analyze the kinematic constraints and to design and analyze each component. Subsequent chapters deal with the issues of tolerancing, modeling and controlling variation buildup in assemblies, and finally using datum flow chains to analyze and debug complex assemblies prior to designing the manufacturing system.

The next two chapters deal with what Whitney refers to as the basic processes of assembly: assembling compliantly supported rigid parts, and assembling components that are themselves compliant. These chapters are followed by a treatment of the role of assembly in the product‐design process, with an entire chapter devoted to the often overlooked topic of product architecture and its importance in subsequent assembly operations. The book concludes with chapters on familiar topics such as design for assembly and design for “X”, and relatively unfamiliar topics such as the ergonomics and economics of assembly operations.

A CD included with the text contains an additional chapter which is a detailed case study of the manufacture of an aircraft wing, along with several MATLAB, Excel, and Basic Programs to implement various procedures outlined in the text. In addition, several reports, class projects, and even a discrete event simulation program are included. The amount and level of sophistication of the additional material included with this text sets a new standard for mechanical engineering texts.

In this reviewer's opinion, this text will become the standard reference on Mechanical Assemblies for engineers and designers for many years to come. Mechanical Assemblies is a welcome addition to the fields of mechanical design and manufacturing system design, and is an excellent complement to Bralla's Design for Manufacturability Handbook and Otto and Wood's Product Design. Whitney's global approach to assembly, from detailed design of individual components through system architecture to factory – scale assembly lines is exactly what is needed. This book would be an excellent textbook for senior undergraduate or beginning graduate courses in product design engineering and manufacturing systems engineering, and would be useful as a supplementary text for courses in automation or assembly robot design. The extensive and detailed use of case studies and examples at every stage throughout the book makes the text both interesting and accessible, both to university students and to practitioners in the field. Professor Whitney is to be commended for the excellent job he has done here.