Industrial Equipment & Machinery
Process Improvement
You can improve your manufacturing processes and increase your profits, without increasing costs.
Are you dealing with an existing process that is not performing well? Use Design of Experiments to study your process weakness(es). You efficiently collect the data you need to understand your bottleneck and get your process on track. You can improve your yield, lower production cost and reliably produce higher quality goods.
Design of Experiments has helped the world’s leading manufacturers develop high quality products and processes efficiently. Design of Experiments works on a wide variety of manufacturing processes.
Process improvement example
The bottom line: The Product needed a strong bond between ceramic and metal.
Here is what the lead engineer said about this project: “This was one of the more difficult problems I've worked on. I almost thought it was too complicated to solve. But by using designed experiments...I was able to sort through the data and understand the process.” (Gregory Ferguson, Quality Digest July 1999)
The project:
The product had a ceramic component which was coated with a metallic layer, but the two materials were not bonding properly. Engineers first varied the paste that coated the ceramic part, along with the time and temperature of the paste solution. These experimental parts went through the rest of the metal adhesion process. A Kovar metal strip was brazed to the metallic surface; the force that it took to remove the Kovar strip was measured with a pressure transducer. This force was considered the experimental response i.e. a higher force meant a stronger adhesive bond between the ceramic and the metal.
The three initial factors (variables) produced no significant difference in bond strength. The engineers then conducted a series of designed experiments over several months, covering every possible factor in the bonding process. Knowing which process factors are not critical to the final product was a benefit of this work.
Experimenters determined a strong correlation between the type of grinding wheel used to prepare the ceramic surface and the final strength of the ceramic:metal bond. Using that certain type of grinding wheel to prepare the ceramic surface was the factor that produced the strongest ceramic:metal bond.
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