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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.

When using aluminum for vehicle body parts to reduce weight, the high pressure die casting (HPDC) is widely applied due to its adaptability to thin-wall products, near-net-shape castability, and short casting cycle time. Since a hollow construction is advantageous to increase stiffness of body parts, there has been a need of development of techniques for casting of hollow parts by HPDC. So far, hollow casting by HPDC has been realized for small parts using sand cores. When applying that method to large parts, however, it is necessary to increase filling speed. When the filling speed is increased, the core tends to break. In this project, we have developed a method to estimate changes of pressure distribution when filling molten metal by the casting simulation in order to analyze damages to the core. Through the analysis, we discovered occurrence of impulsive pressure waves.

A new series of heavy duty diesel engines has been put into production by the Construction Equipment Division of the International Harvester Company. The new engines known as the 300-400 series displace a number of older IH units. The engines have been tooled for commonality of parts and for economical high volume production. This paper deals with some aspects of the tooling, fabrication, assembly and production testing of the engines.

Tektite was manufactured by the General Electric Company in conjunction with the Office of Naval Research, Department of Interior, NASA, and other government, industry and academic organizations. It was manufactured to house four marine scientists for a 60-day period on the ocean floor at a 50 foot depth at an isolated site in the Virgin Islands. The habitat and associated surface equipment provided for life support, environmental control, communications, surface monitoring, safety and comfort of the four aquanauts. The Tektite I experiment was completed safely within minutes of the time scheduled many months previously. The habitat was returned to General Electric in Philadelphia where it was refurbished for the Tektite II mission. This mission is currently in progress in the Virgin Islands and is due to be complete in early November 1970.

In recent years, natural laminar flow (NLF) has been proven to be achievable on modern smooth airframe surfaces over a range of cruise flight conditions representative of most current business and commuter aircraft. Published waviness and boundary-layer transition measurements on several modern metal and composite airframes have demonstrated the fact that achievable surface waviness is readily compatible with laminar flow requirements. Currently, the principle challenge to the manufacture of NLF-compatible surfaces is two-dimensional roughness in the form of steps and gaps at structural joints. This paper presents results of recent NASA investigations on manufacturing tolerances for NLF surfaces, including results of a flight experiment. Based on recent research, recommendations are given for conservative manufacturing tolerances for waviness and shaped steps.

At Western Washington University s Vehicle Research Institute (VRI) students are currently working on producing a Formula Race Car for the annual SAE competition For the last two years students in the VRI in collaboration with the Manufacturing Engineering Technology (MET) program have been using an integrated CAD/CAM approach in designing and manufacturing parts for the car Some of the parts manufactured with this approach include Bulkheads as main chassis members a-arms for suspension brake callipers hubs drive sprockets spindles drive axles shifter components suspension uprights and wheel reinforcements All the parts are machined on a four axis CNC Vertical Machining Centre and a three axis Turning Centre This integrated CAD/CAM approach allows a team of ten students to design and produce a complete race car in a period of eight months with excellent successes in the competition having achieved fourth place overall in a field of eighty-five competitors Having won the best performing car at the event the integrated CAD/CAM approach is considered the driving force behind the success

PTFE began to see limited use as a seal material in the late 1950's. In the 70's and 80's, it became the material of choice for diesel engine crankshaft seals in North America. Despite its well documented success in these applications, the use of this material in the automotive market was hampered by the additional costs necessary to manufacture it. With the introduction of an economical method for bonding PTFE to metal, the finished cost of a PTFE seal becomes competitive with elastomeric seals in sizes and types conventionally used in the automotive market.