Manufacturing Technology (ME461)

Instructor: Shantanu Bhattacharya

Quality Engineering
Two major determinants of success in any organization are market demand and profitability. The factors influencing and improving the competitive edge of a company are the its unit cost , product quality and lead time. The best approach of product quality is to build quality into the product and process right at the product and process design stage. Quality may also be improved at the production stage. (For this purpose techniques such as statistical process control are helpful in reducing the no. of non conforming products, thereby improving the product quality.

Understanding the Meaning of Quality

Quality is a relative term. It is really in the eyes of the beholder. From functional point of view, product is considered to be of good quality if it meets the desired functional requirements adequately over the intended period of its use. As per the American Society of Quality Control: Quality is the totality of features and characteristics of a product or service that bear on its ability to satisfy a given need.

The Dimensions of Quality

Quality is characterized by multiple dimensions as follows: 1. Performance : Primary operating characteristics. 2. Features: Secondary operating characteristics. 3. Time: Time waiting in line, time from concept to production of a new product, time to complete a service. 4. Reliability: Extent of failure free operation. 5. Durability: Amount of use until replacement is preferable to repair. 6. Uniformity: Low variations among the repeated outcomes of a process. 7. Consistency: Match with documentation, advertising, deadlines, or industry standards. 8. Serviceability: Resolution of problems and complaints. 9. Aesthetics: Characteristics related to the senses. 10. Personal interface: Characteristics such as punctuality, courtesy and professionalism. 11. Harmlessness: Characteristics related to safety , health and environment. 12. Perceived quality: Indirect measures or inferences about one or more of the dimensions, reputation.

Quality Costs
One important aspect of the product development process is to translate the customer requirements into product specifications. Manufactured products not meeting the specifications should be repaired. Thus the prime quality costs for supplying satisfactory products to customers include producing, identifying, avoiding or repairing products that do not meet customer requirements. Quality costs have been classified in a number of different categories as follows: 1. Prevention costs 2. Appraisal costs 3. Internal Failure Costs 4. External Failure Costs

Prevention costs: Prevention cost include all efforts that go into designing and manufacturing a product that meets customer requirements by preventing nonconformance. The various elements of prevention costs include activities involving quality planning and engineering, new product reviews, product and process design, process control, training , and quality data acquisition and analysis. Appraisal Costs: These include all those costs involved in measuring, evaluating, or auditing products, components, and purchased materials to ensure conformance with the standards and specifications. Specifically, appraisal costs include cost of activities such as inspection and test of incoming material, product inspection and test, materials and services consumed and maintaining accuracy of test equipment. Internal Failure Costs: Internal failure occurs when products fail to meet the customer quality requirements before being shipped to the customers. Internal failure costs include all the cost elements involved in rectifying this situation. Examples of internal failure cost elements are failure analysis, scrap, repair, retest, downtime, yield losses and downgrading of usual specifications. External Failure Costs: External failures occur when the products do not function satisfactorily after being supplied to the customer. Major costs are incurred for activities such as complaint adjustment and dealing with returned products. Other costs include warranty charges and liability costs.

A framework for Quality Improvement

To be successful in a competitive business environment, it is important to deliver products that meet customer requirements with respect to quality, cost and delivery schedule and also keep on improving the product quality. Where are the opportunities to improve product quality in any product life cycle? The product life cycle starts with product planning and continues through such phases as : 1. Product design 2. Production process design 3. Production 4. Maintenance and product service. By building in quality right at the design stage the cost of quality control at the production stage can be considerably reduced. Therefore, the preferable approach to improving the product quality is to build quality into the products at the product design stage, followed by improvements at the process design stage and them at production engineering, maintenance and product service stages.

Designing quality into products and processes

Product design is the prime activity in the process of realizing a product. Therefore it has the greatest impact on the product quality. Loss of quality occurs when there is a deviation of functional characteristics of the products from the target values. Taguchi has proposed a philosophy and methodology for designing quality into products and processes. He postulates that the process of designing a product or a process should be viewed as three phases. System Design, Parameter Design and Tolerance Design

 System Design: System design is the process of applying scientific knowledge to produce a basic functional prototype design. In this phase, new concepts, ideas and methods are synthesized to provide new or improved products to customers. That means that the basic design concept is established during this phase including selection of parts, materials and subassemblies. For example while designing a car the following questions need to be addressed. Like should the internal combustion engine block be of cast iron or aluminum alloy? Should the brakes be antilock brakes? The relationship between the inputs and outputs are established. Also, the functions of parts and subsystems are determined during this phase. Parameter design: In the parameter design phase, the levels for the products/ process design parameters are set to make the system performance less sensitive to causes of variation thus minimizing quality loss. In parameter design wide tolerances on noise factors are assumed to allow low manufacturing cost, as it is costly to control noise factors. During the parameter design phase the quality is improved without controlling or removing the cause of variation. Design of experiments, Simulation and optimization are techniques used during the parameter stage.

 Tolerance Design: The tolerance design phase usually follows the parameter design phase. Quality improvement is achieved by tight tolerances around the chosen target values of the control factors so as to reduce performance variations. However, with quality improvement- that is, reduction in quality loss- there may be an increase in manufacturing cost.

 What is Quality loss? The traditional understanding of quality loss is shown in the figure 1. The objective in the traditional quality

Taguchi Loss Function

approach is to ensure that the manufactured products fall within the specification limits and are considered to be of good quality. Those not meeting the specifications are considered bad in quality and are either rejected or reworked. So loss is incurred only when the quality characteristics fall outside the specification limits. The modern approach to quality considers that loss is always incurred whenever the functional quality characteristics of a product deviates from its target value, denoted by T, regardless of how small the deviation is. The increase in value of functional characteristics from the target value either way results in increasing the quality loss.

At the LSL and USL the loss equals the cost of manufacturing or disposal of the product.

Average Quality Loss

There is always a variation in the quality characteristic due to noise factors from unit to unit from time to time during the usage of the product. If yi ( i= 1,2,3------) is the ith representative measurement of quality characteristics y, then the average quality loss can be computed as follows:

Average Quality Loss

Average Quality Loss

Common variations of loss functions

Product characteristics are the barometers of quality of products in the sense that they describe and measure the performance of products relative to the customer requirements and expectations. From the customer point of view, the loss is minimum if quality characteristics is at the target value. However, the expectations of the customers would differ from product to product, and these can be characterized when these are at the target values.

 Nominal is the best when y is at target. Examples include dimension, viscosity and clearance.

Common variations of Loss functions

Smaller is better; that is, y tends to zero, where target is zero. Examples of quality characteristics include wear, shrinkage, deterioration, friction loss, and microfinish of a machined surface among others.
Larger is better; y tends to infinity when the target is at infinity. Examples include fuel efficiency, ultimate strength, and life.

Applications of Quality Loss Function: The quality loss function has been used as a decision support tool in a number of situations . Determine best factory Tolerances: The loss function can be used to determine economical factory tolerances: Example: Consider the production of automatic transmissions for trucks. The transmission shift point is one of the critical quality characteristics. Truck drivers would feel very uneasy if the transmission shift point was farther than the tramsmission output speed on the first to second gear shift by 35 rpm. Suppose it costs the manufacturer $200 to adjust the valve body to fix the shift point problem. However, it may cost only $16.40 for labor charges to make adjustments during the manufacturing and testing phase. Determine the factory tolerances.

 Product Selection : The loss function can be used to select products as illustrated by the following example. High-Tech Rotor Dynamics is planning to buy a couple of thousand bolts to be used in their systems. The system requires highly reliable bolts. In case of bolt failure the system repair cost is estimated to be $15.00. Two companies that offer different kinds of alloys in their products bid to supply the bolts. High-tech decides to go for destructive testing using 20 specimens. The criterion used for testing is the ultimate tensile strength measured in Kgf/mm2. The lower specification limit is 11Kgf/mm2The purchase quantity is 20,000. The unit costs of products A and B are $.14 and $.13, respectively. Advise high tech rotor dynamics for its purchase decision.

Data on Ultimate Tensile Strength of Bolts

Product (Bolt) A 15.5 14.2 B 15.5 11.2 13.8 14.1 10.8 14.1 15.1 14.9 15.1 11.9 Ultimate Tensile Strength Data (Kgf/mm2) 15.3 14.8 16.3 14.8 13.7 15.5 13.7 17.5 15.5 14.2 10.5 14.2 13.8 14.5 13.8 17.5 15.1 14.6 15.1 14.6 15.2 14.4 12.2 18.4 13.6 15.4 17.6 13.4

Robust Design of Products and Processes

Robust design is an approach to designing a product or process that emphasizes reduction of performance variation through the use of design techniques that reduce sensitivity to sources of variation. Simply stated we want to achieve the target of quality characteristic but at the same time we want to minimize the variation in a products functional characteristics to ensure minimum quality loss. The target and the variance of a products quality characteristic are affected by certain variables which can be classified as controllable factors and uncontrollable factors, also known as noise factors. Noise Factors

Signal Factors

Engineered System

Response

Control Factors

Controllable Factors
Controllable factors are those that can be easily controlled, such as choice of materials, mold temperature, and cutting speed on a machine tool. They can be separated into two major groups: factors controlled by the user/ operator and factors controlled by designers.

Factors controlled by User/ Operator: These are also known as signal factors. A signal factor carries the intent to the system from a customers point of view to attain the target performance or to express the intended output. Consider the steering system of a car. A drivers intent is to change direction. For this purpose the driver changes the steering wheel position, thus giving a signal to the automobile to change directions. In this case the signal factor is the angular displacement of the steering wheel. Other example of signal factors include setting a remote control button of a television set to control volume and brightness and setting the temperature control knob of a refrigerator

Factors controlled by Designers

There are three types of factors in this category: 1. Variability control factors: Those that affect the variability in a response are called variability control factors or simply control factors. For example, the transistor gain in an electrical power circuit is a variability control factor. 2. Target control factors: These factors can easily be adjusted to achieve the desired functional relationship between the user input signal and the response. For example the gear ratio in the steering mechanism of an automobile can be selected during the product design stage to get the required sensitivity of the turning radius to a change in the steering angle. 3. Neutral factors: These are factors that do not affect either the mean response or the variability in the response. They are also known as neutral factors. It is important to know these neutral factors, since the cost savings can be obtained by setting them at their most economical levels.

Noise Factors
Noise factors are, in general, responsible for the functional characteristics of a product deviating from the target value results in quality loss. Noise factors can be classified as: 1. Outer Noise: The variables external to a product that affect the product performance are known as external noise factors. Examples include variations in temperature, humidity, and dust. 2. Inner Noise: Inner noise is a result of variations due to the deterioration of parts and materials. Examples include loss of resilience of springs, wearing out of parts due to friction, and increase in resistance of resistors with age. 3. Between Product Noise: Between product noise is due to the variation in the product variables from unit to unit, which is inevitable in a manufacturing process. Examples include material variations. Noise factors, as the name suggests, are uncontrollable factors. Trying to control noise factors may be a vary expensive proposition, if not impossible. Taguchis approach to robust design of products and processes attempts to reduce variability by changing the variability control factors while maintaining the required average performance through appropriate adjustments in the target control factors.

Electrical Power Circuit Design

An electrical power circuit design example given by Taguchi is used to illustrate the separation of variability control and target control variables. The quality characteristic of interest is output voltage, y, with a target value of y0 . The output voltage is largely determined by the gain of a transistor in the circuit, x, whose nominal value can be controlled. The input-output relationship is nonlinear as shown in Fig. 9.3 (a). The product design engineer can select the nominal value of x to be x0 to achieve the target value of y0 . However, in real life the transistor gain can deviate from the nominal value x0 .because of manufacturing imperfections in the transistor, deterioration during the circuits life span, and environmental variations. This deviation of the actual transistor gain around its nominal value is essentially due to internal noise. If the distribution of x is as shown in the figure, then we can reduce the variance of the output by selecting higher values of the input. For example if we select the nominal value of the transistor gain as x1 instead of x0 , the output variance is reduced but this results in a higher mean y1 compared with the target y0 . Suppose we have a resistor in the circuit that has a linear effect on the voltage at all levels of the transistor gain; then we can easily change the mean y1 to the desired target value y0 by changing the resistance of the resistor as shown in the figure ahead.

Non-Linear Input-Output relationship and linear relationship between output voltage and resistance

We have achieved what we wanted: the output response is on target and the variability in the output is minimized. We can therefore categorize the transistor gain as a variability control factor and resistance as a target control factor.

Failure Mode Effect Analysis

This is an important technique that is widely used in industry, including the big three auto manufacturers, for continuous product quality improvement to satisfy the needs of the customer. FMEA can be described as a systematized group of activities intended to: 1. Recognize and evaluate the potential failure of a product/ process and its effects. 2. Identify actions that could eliminate or reduce the chance of potential failure occurring. 3. Document the process. It is complementary to the design process of defining positively what a design process must do to satisfy the customer. FMEA is a generic approach that can be used to identify failure modes and analyze their effects on the system performance with the objective of developing a preventive strategy.

Failure mode effect analysis

Process FMEA is a methodology for evaluating the process for possible ways in which the failures can occur. The primary objective in process FMEA is to eliminate potential production failure effects by identifying important characteristics that have to be measured, controlled and monitored. The FMEA philosophy is based on the characterization of potential failures. Failures are characterized by the following tuple: (Occurrence, severity and detection). Occurrence: How often the failure occurs? Severity: How serious the failure is? Detection: How easy or difficult it is to detect the failure? Examples of typical failure modes include cracked, dirty, deformed, bent and burred components; worn tools and improper setup.

Failure mode effect analysis

To implement process FMEA, the following steps may be taken: Identify the problems for each operation using brainstorming and committee discussions. Cause and effect diagrams can be used. For example, the potential causes of machine failures could involve mechanical or electrical subsystem failure, tools, inspection equipments, operators and so forth. Use flow process charts as a basis for understanding the problem. This provides a common basis for communication among the committee members. Collect data. Data collection may be necessary if data are not already available. Prioritize the problems to be studied. The ranking of priorities is based on the following: RPN (risk priority number) = occurrence X severity X detection Use appropriate tools to analyze the problems by making use of the data. Implement the suggestions. Confirm and evaluate the results by doing some experiments and ask whether you are better or worse off or the same as before. Repeat the FMEA as often as necessary.

Real Life Illustration of the Use of Process FMEA

Process steps for FMEA

The process involves manual application of wax inside a car door, with the objective of retarding corrosion. In items 1 to 8 information such as part identification, names of team members, and date is provided. Items 9 through 22 systematically describe the process FMEA approach. In this example the problem of corrosion in car door is considered. To retard corrosion the manual application of wax is considered. The manner in which this process could potentially fail to meet the process requirements or design intent is defined by potential failure mode. In our example, the failure mode is insufficient wax coverage over the specified surface. We have to determine the effect of failure in terms of what the customer might experience. Here it would be the unsatisfactory appearance due to the rust and impaired function of the interior door hardware. The next step is to asses the seriousness of the effect based on a severity scale of 1-10. (Column 12) We now have to define the potential cause of failure in terms of something that can be corrected or controlled. For every potential cause the frequency of occurrence should be estimated on a scale of 110. here 10 means that the failure is inevitable. We now have to access the probability of detection of the cause of failure by current practice. This is also on a scale of 1-10 where 1 denotes a very low probability. The next step is to calculate the risk priority no.

Improving product quality during the production phase

As dicussed many times the very survival of companies depends on continuous improvement of quality.

Quality can be designed into a product, as we have seen in the previous section, but then the product must be manufactured.
During the manufacturing process assignable causes may occur, seemingly at random. These assignable causes result in a shift in the process to an out of control state, resulting in an output that may not confirm to requirements. To produce quality output it is necessary to have a process that is stable or repeatable, a process capable of operating with little variability around the target or nominal dimensions of the products quality characteristics. The idea behind improving quality is to reduce variability and eliminate waste.

Quality improvement process

Statistical Process Control

Statistical process control is very useful in monitoring process stability and improving process capability by reducing variability. It should be emphasized here that SPC alone cannot reduce variability. However, with the aid of process improvement tools such as design of experiments, process variability can be reduced. The following are widely used as process improvement tools: 1. Histogram 2. Check Sheet 3. Pareto Chart 4. Cause and Effect Diagram 5. Defect Concentration Diagram 6. Scatter Diagram 7. Control Chart

Histogram
Suppose it is needed to produce a shaft within 1+ 0.05 in. On a numerically controlled turning machine. The shaft diameters are plotted against frequency as shown in the figure below.

The plot is known as histogram, and it provides information on the central tendency, spread, and shape. We see that the distribution of the shaft diameter is symmetric with the mean around 1 in. and variability between 0.95 and 1.05 in.

Check Sheet
A check sheet serves as a useful tool for collecting historical or current operating data for the process under investigation.

In the early stages of implementation of the SPC, it is important to understand what causes failure of the system or product performance. This could be due to a number of defects which even may not affect the product performance but certainly affects the quality of the products. For example common product such as spark plug used in a car. Over a period of 5 days a list of spark plug defects is recorded on a check sheet. Some defects are due to tool changeovers to different types, as for the raised stud defects. This check sheet helps in identifying the sources of these defects with respect to time. We notice that except for dirty cores the defects are not recorded everyday. Cores are supplied from outside vendors therefore the problem lies in controlling the quality of the incoming part.

Pareto Chart
The Pareto law states that on an average 80 % of the defects stem from 20% of the causes. In case of the spark plugs most of the quality problems come from only three out of nine or more problem areas. A Pareto diagram is helpful in identifying the fact that taking care of these few problems takes care of 80% of all causes of the problem situation.

Cause and effect diagram

A cause and effect diagram is a technique for systematically listing the various causes of a problem. The CAE diagram, also known as the fish bone diagram or Ishikawa Diagram (credited to Dr. Kaoru Ishikawa), serves as a tool to indicate how various causes can operate independently as well as simultaneously to produce an eventual effect on the manufactured product. For example consider the quality of the turned part such as a shaft. Poor quality may be caused by several factors, such as works-manship, worn tool, or non optimal machining conditions.

Defect Concentration Diagram

A defect concentration diagram is a visual representation of the unit under study showing all possible views with all possible defects identified on it. This type of representation is useful in understanding the types of defects and their possible causes.

Scatter Diagram
A scatter diagram is useful in establishing a relationship between two variables. The shape of the scatter diagram is obtained by plotting the two variables. It may indicate a positive or negative correlation between the variables or no correlation at all. Such information helps in developing a control strategy for these variables.

Control Chart