Assessment of photo-activated adhesive workholding (PAW) technology for holding "hard-to-hold" workpieces for machining

Manufacturers often have to machine "hard-to-hold" metallic workpieces using conventional fixturing. In these special cases, machined feature quality typically suffers from set-up related errors, or set-up lead time suffers from the extra time necessary to check and correct for them. A technology that may alleviate both problems is photo-activated workholding (PAW) technology. This paper describes an investigation in which a photo-activated workholding (PAW) technology solution was created to hold a "hard-to- hold" bracket casting for low volume machining at a contract manufacturer. A comparison to the existing conventional solution revealed that the PAW technology yielded substantially better machined feature quality, machining lead time, and machining cost.