Muhammad Abubakar Ramzan, Muhammad Waseem Haider and Hamza Tanveer2025-11-012025-11-012019https://escholar.umt.edu.pk/handle/123456789/9863When workpiece is located on a fixture, it will be actuated by different forces like Gravity, Cutting and inertia forces during the machining operations. A well constrained workpiece show minimum deformation during machining and it can be constrained by proper positioning of fixture elements. Most of the research in fixture layout optimization is done on rigid bodies and some work has been done on sheet metals to find optimum position of fixture elements. But, the selection of number of clamps entirely depends on the expertise of the designer. Therefore, the research work to select automatically the initial number of clamps and their position is somehow new. In this research, a model will be established to reduce deformation up to 2mm with optimized number of clamps and fixture elements. It involves two different methodologies namely maximum deformation method and means method. In maximum deformation method workpiece is divided into four quadrants and the node with maximum deformation in each quadrant is selected. Clamps are added to the edge near to the maximum deformation nodes in each quadrant and adding clamps on the edge near to the maximum deformation nodes in continued until deformation becomes lower than 2mm. In means method procedure is the same as in maximum deformation method but average deformation is measure in each quadrant instead of maximum deformation. Then a node is selected from each quadrant whose value is closer to the value of average deformation of respective quadrant. Then clamps are placed on the edge near to average deformation values nodes till the value of maximum deformation becomes less than 2mm. The case study is solved with the proposed method and the results of the case study justify the proposed method.enThesis