Finite, uncertain, and increasingly expensive
energy resources require a better understanding of energy
utilization in all sectors of the national economy including agriculture. A significant portion of energy used
in agriculture is required for the manufacturing, installation, transporting, and operation of irrigation systems.
Quantification of the amounts of energy used...
Today's manufacturing environment is characterized by competition and
continuous change in product and process requirements. The concept of
"design for manufacturability" integrates product specifications with
manufacturing capabilities by considering the design and manufacturing
phases as an integrated system, evaluating the combined system during
the design phase of a product ,...
The importance of integrating design and manufacturing becomes apparent when the increase in the degree of difficulty of change is observed as the product development proceeds from concept to production in a serial engineering process. The greatest opportunity in design for manufacture occurs at the initial design stage before any...
Improvement of manufacturing productivity is dependent on the successful
automation of manufacturing processes, the success of which is based in turn upon
the availability of information which describes the state of manufacturing operations.
Acoustic Emission (AE) signals related to the cutting process and tool wear have
been recently applied to...
The implementation of concurrent engineering into many large
companies has greatly improved their product development processes.
These companies have seen significant gains in quality and customer
satisfaction with reduced product costs, defects, and time-to-market
(Lake, 1992). Many large companies have successfully employed this
relatively new product development philosophy. However, smaller...
This research studied the effects of changing from a traditional manufacturing
system to a cell manufacturing system in a value-added wood products company.
Discrete event simulation was used to describe the current system and the proposed
new systems. Parts were separated into part families that shared similar processing
requirements. From...
Softwood plywood is one of the structural wood products studied in the CORRIM
II effort to document the environmental performance of wood product in residential
structures. Life-cycle inventory (LCI) models were developed to provide performance
data for plywood production by tracking all of its inputs and outputs in a gate-to-gate...
When the nonconformities are independent, a multivariate control chart for nonconformities called a demerit control chart using a distribution approximation technique called an Edgeworth Expansion, is proposed. For a demerit control chart, an exact control limit can be obtained in special cases, but not in general. A proposed demerit control...
Simulation is a powerful analytical tool for designing or experimenting with complex systems. Simulation has been defined as the process of designing a model of a real system and conducting experiments with this model either to understand the system’s behavior or to evaluate various strategies for operating it (Pegden et...
In this research, an analytical model for analyzing a production line consisting of a series
of automated workstations with infinite buffers is developed. Automated workstations are
assumed to have deterministic processing times, and independent exponentially
distributed operating time between failures and repair times. The analytical model starts
with existing results...