This award provides resources to procure equipment to support research in four areas, including peg in hole insertion in compliant assembly using industrial robots, bearing fault detection, mechanisms of segregation in vibratory particulate motion, and mechanical structural responses. The equipment comprises a vibration exciter system, several accelerometers and displacement sensors, a stroboscope, an IBM PC-AT based data acquisition system, and an X-Y plotter. The assembly task focuses on vibration assisted compliant insertion, and includes analysis of the kinematics and dynamics of the insertion process as well as an experimental study to investigate the effects of various process parameters including vibration frequency, vibration amplitude, compliance, and tolerance. The fault detection research is an alternative machine diagnostics approach to the classical detection scheme which uses experimental results. The method's effectiveness is tested experimentally for bearing systems. The particle dynamics research attempts to understand the mechanisms of particle-particle and particle-wall collisions which are characteristic of many processes involving powdered and granular materials. The mechanical responses study focuses on machine subsystems including machine supports and gear trains.
