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NAFEMS UK Conference 2008 - CheltenhamElite Consulting gave a paper on Robust Design paper at this important conference on 10/11th July in Cheltenham. Short AbstractOver the past few years many companies have adopted a 6-Sigma philosophy and are striving to meet 6-Sigma quality targets, which means only 3 failures per million ‘opportunities’ for failure. Initially the focus was on improving manufacturing processes, but that can only take one so far. In order to take the final step with existing products, design changes may be needed. For new products, 6-sigma quality should be designed in from the start. This means that the main parameters for the design, its nominal dimensions should be set to optimise the design’s performance. However nothing can be made perfectly to these nominal dimensions, so tolerances need to be set to an acceptable level; acceptable both from the point of view of manufacturing process capability and structural and dynamic performance. Too often this final step is not adequately addressed, but only when it has been, can it be said that a robust design has been achieved. A methodology will be discussed for undertaking a statistical analysis of tolerances to meet manufacturing criteria, whilst taking into account the requirements and results from structural and dynamic analysis, so that a robust optimum design can be achieved. Stage 1 focussed on the statistical tolerance analysis aspects, using CETol software to analyse a number of parts and assemblies. The second stage of the process was to optimise the structural performance of the design using Pro/Mechanica, taking into account the component variability. A sensitivity analysis was carried out using a Design for Experiments format. Then the information from the tolerance analysis and the structural analysis was combined to produce an optimised design that was insensitive to likely variation. As a result of this process it is now possible, using readily available CAD tools, to carry out sophisticated tolerance and robustness analysis so as to ensure that the structural performance of critical components remains acceptable even when manufacturing variability is taken into account. Long AbstractTo download the long abstract, click here PresentationTo download the presentation that was given at the conference, click here.
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