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New product design, and the development effort accompanying it, requires a high degree of coordination between manufacturing and design engineering. Manufacturing engineering, with the responsibility for determining how a product will be fabricated, is in a position to exert positive influence on product design as well as the areas of capital investment, labor distribution, and profitability. The activities of the Advanced Manufacturing Engineering group at Sikorsky Aircraft are herein described. Both design and manufacturing problems are reviewed with emphasis on specific contributions made by Manufacturing Engineering to their solution. Advanced manufacturing techniques are described and the final designs incorporating these techniques are discussed.

Professionalism in the manufacturing engineering field is reflected through a demonstrated attitude of the individual caring about his own personal progress and his progress on the job, together with management recognition of all the different disciplines that make up the manufacturing engineering team. This philosophy is indicated in the obligation of management to provide opportunity for advancement to all working within the manufacturing engineering specialties, regardless of the individual’s educational level at the outset. A planned approach providing steps to offer continual professional growth in manufacturing engineering at Grumman is described. Recommendations are also made as to specific objectives which would help clarify the importance of the manufacturing engineer’s role in industry.

The multiplicity of advancements in the aerospace sciences and manufacturing technologies have brought both promises and problems. Successful integration of this knowledge is clearly reflected in the product profit. The successful development and introduction of new products is not a matter of “luck” but rather enlightened, comprehensive, step-by-step planning accomplished in cooperation with the product designer early in the product phase. The promise of continued acceleration of new scientific knowledge and development, of new technologies will require manufacturing engineers with vision, courage, the ability to plan, and the desire to learn.

In an era of global manufacturing and reduced costs, it is imperative that the manufacturing floor is visible to top management in a boardroom to enable them to make key decisions. Manufacturing Execution System (MES) is a method of connecting the shop floor to the top floor covering the complete gamut of activities from production sequence to finished goods. It aims to reduce the delay in transmitting production related data by linking the Production environment, Quality management, IT systems and Delivery. At Ashok Leyland’s Commercial Vehicle manufacturing facility in Ennore, India, an engine and axle components machine shop have been networked and data pertaining to production of Cylinder Block, Cylinder Head, Camshaft, Crankshaft, Axle Arm and Axle Beam components are accessible from anywhere in the company irrespective of location.

Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) have evolved from manufacturing control systems. The driving force is the increased requirements for mass customization [1] and a higher number of customer options. As the name implies, MES have an emphasis on Execution not just passive data collection. This paper looks at the functionality and architecture of MES applications. The primary conclusion is that MES are no more a silver bullet than other software fads have been over the last 30 years. The benefits come to those organizations willing to act on the information and go beyond just installing another software package.

Following-earlier work on the development of a concept car for the nineties employing a weld-bonded aluminum alloy load bearing base unit, work has continued on this aluminum structured vehicle technology (ASVT) to develop and test the manufacturing feasibility and economics for high volume production. The paper reviews the feasibility of the total manufacturing process highlighting experiences from further work, including developments in aluminum welding technology. The overall economic cost comparison between an aluminum structured vehicle (ASV) and a spot-welded coated steel monocoque vehicle shows that there need not be a cost premium for the aluminum structured car.

Parent bore materials of copper-containing hypereutectic Al-Si alloys have been tried with limited success. Fundamentally the reason for this technology limitation is because copper-containing hypereutectic aluminum-silicon alloys precipitate the copper-phase late in the solidification process and hinder the feeding process to make sound castings. As a result, the copper-containing hypereutectic Al-Si alloys that have been used in the past as parent bore materials have been compromises of low silicon content, which has translated into low wear resistances and the need for special surface treatments. This paper presents the new advancements to the old hypereutectic aluminum-silicon technology for linerless parent bore aluminum blocks. The technology is centered around the use of a copper-free hypereutectic aluminum-silicon alloy parent bore material and a piston coating that has particles of a solid lubricant embedded in the plated coating.

The generation of holes in graphite/epoxy composite materials for the installation of thousands of fasteners is one of the costliest operations in the production of high-performance aircraft. The increasing use of composite materials in aircraft structures has made the development of lower cost manufacturing methods imperative. This paper describes the manufacturing methods, cutting tools, feed rates and speeds developed for reducing the costs of generating high quality holes in composite graphite/epoxy materials.

This paper describes various methods and technologies that have been newly implemented for manufacturing a new-generation V6 engine with high product quality and at low cost. This new engine, the VQ30DE, is mounted in the latest Maxima model. Design for manufacturability was pursued through concurrent engineering between the product development and production engineering departments from the initial stage and included the development of a new system for evaluating productivity. A new engine plant was also constructed which adopts new automation facilities to minimize production time. These new approaches support the production of a high-quality, high-reliability engine.

This paper shows to the reader the importance, the results and advantages that the companies could obtain, using technical operation training for employees related to a specific product. The Technical Training has been used to provide knowledge, to direct and indirect people who have the specific responsibility related to a product manufactured in the companies. The ones that discovered how develop and implement similar projects, have been getting fantastic results related to productive and quality performance. Using a recently project implemented by our company, the executives, managers and engineers who are responsible for teams members, can get some information to be used with theirs groups.

THE introduction to this paper includes definitions of the major items under discussion, and is followed by a discussion of the materials most widely used in metal-aircraft construction and their important physical properties. In the remainder of the paper are described some of the problems encountered in metal construction and the processes that have been developed to facilitate manufacture. The following specific items are discussed: (1) Design, (2) Tooling, including lofting, (3) Fabrication, (4) Assembly, (5) Inspection, and (6) Protective coating. Special equipment and tools are illustrated.

A five level process for improved design for manufacturing and assembly has been in use in several vehicle programs. The method developed over a decade ago internally has proven to be very useful as a quality tool in automotive systems with over a dozen archival papers available in the knowledge base professional literature for reference.. Recent expansions of the process has led to the Proactive Design for Quality system in which the emphasis is placed on the timing and intensity of the integrated quality tools and processes to achieve the maximum benefits. This paper is a continuation of this extensive work in automotive development and focuses on the proactive utilization of computer simulation processes to support product creation and manufacturing. Computer simulation to support product creation can take several forms including dimensional tolerance simulation, impact analysis, design for manufacturing and design for assembly..

The ever increasing need for improved automobile fuel economy led to the eventual use of light weight materials such as aluminum amoung other things. This paper discusses techniques and problems of assembling aluminum and steel sheet metal stampings into Hood Assemblies. This paper does not attempt laboratory type research in fastening methods, such as spot welding, but discusses the application of these techniques from a Fabrication Plant point of view. In particular, this paper will discuss two hoods and their respective assembly processes. First, a low volume (30,000 units/yr.) bimetalic hood used on a 1975-76 “E” body, and second, a high volume all aluminum/all steel hood for a standard sized car.

A test was conducted on two cars to determine the effectiveness of a dip process for protection against corrosion. Improvements of the dip process were better cleaning of inside surfaces of enclosed structural members, solving the problem of solvent refluxing or vapor washdown, and replacement of fluid deadener on the top side of floor pans with a heavy coat of water reducible dip primer followed by a heavy coat of the body primer. Results of the test indicate that the process is successful.

This paper discusses manufacturing related educational and research programs in the School of Engineering and Computer Science (SECS) at Oakland University, a Michigan institution located some thirty miles north of Detroit. The SECS vision statement positions the School to help meet the requirements and challenges of automotive and automotive related industries. As part of this vision SECS offers a manufacturing program as an option under the undergraduate Mechanical Engineering degree. Also, in collaboration with such companies as Chrysler and Deloitte and Touche, SECS has developed several unique, manufacturing related research programs that will be discussed in this paper.

Transmission errors, axial shuttling forces, and friction result in bearing forces that serve as the major excitations of gear noise. This paper focuses on a comparison of these factors, as well as stresses for two designs: one being an original product design and the second being a slightly finer pitch design that has the equivalent design life of the original design. The original gear design shows higher transmission errors and bearing forces, thus creating more noise than the finer pitch gear pair. It was noted from testing that no matter how the profile and lead modifications to the original coarse pitch gear pair were changed, it was difficult to make it quieter. On the other hand, no matter how the profile and lead modifications to the finer pitch gear pair were changed, it was difficult to make it noisy. This paper shows the effects of different profiles and leads for the gear pairs on noise excitations and stresses.

Reduced manufacturing costs and flow time, along with increased structural fatigue life and reduced in-service maintenance problems can be realized with the Fatigue Technology Inc. (FTI) ForceMate® (FmCx™) system of installing high-interference bushings into aircraft structures. Bell Helicopter reported [1] a projected $24 million cost savings with the use of ForceMate. This paper will describe the ForceMate system in detail as well as an alternative bushing installation method, BushLoc, and the manufacturing benefits realized with their use. The ForceMate bushing installation system installs bushings with a consistently high level of interference in a fraction of the time of traditional methods, such as shrink and press fit. It is a safer method, reduces hardware variability and provides a higher integrity bushing installation with significant structural fatigue life improvement.

All automotive ECUs are required to be designed for manufacturability. Sufficient support in the ECU product design needs to be incorporated early in the product life cycle for the product to be successfully and efficiently manufactured, necessitating serial communication capability in the design. However, in low-cost automotive Instrument Clusters the customer requirements for the product typically do not encapsulate serial communication, and the ECU is not required to support repair/rework out of field rejection. This paper delineates the said need, examines the challenges for manufacturability of low-cost Instrument Clusters and proposes a plausible design strategy to help the issue with a use-case instance.

Process Driven Design yields proven benefits in automotive product design. The use of plastics is expanding in the automotive industry. The designer requires a knowledge of the methods of processing plastic parts. This work provides this information by giving a brief description of plastic processing techniques. Included in this is an extensive table of processing techniques and current parts fabricated by these methods. Extension of the process to future automotive products is included.