A Model for Predicting Manufacturing Waste in Product Design and Process Planning

Karl R. Haapala | MS | 2003

Abstract:

Since the early stages of the Industrial Revolution in the late 1700s, manufacturers have sought to develop advantages over their competition. Traditionally, the focus has centered on sustaining the financial bottom line, initially by improving process efficiency and yield. As the global automotive industry witnessed the success of Japanese automakers following World War II through the implementation of quality methods, a new industrial paradigm – the Quality Revolution – took root. Almost simultaneously, environmental concern began to arise within society, manifesting itself most notably as environmental regulations and industrial environmental initiatives. Stakeholder ideologies began to converge in the 1990s, resulting in the coinage of such terms as life cycle analysis, design for the environment, and environmentally responsible manufacturing, along with recognizing the need for sustainable economic, social, and environmental futures – a triple bottom line.

Today, society, government, and industry are beginning to view the need for environmental regulations as a signal of engineering failure, which legitimizes the need for a new engineering paradigm and supporting toolset. This research outlines a framework and develops a model software decision support tool for product designers and process planners to analyze strategies for reducing environmental impact prior to production.

Previous work at Michigan Technological University established unit process models to predict energy consumption. The predictive models were implemented into a computer software tool (E-Fab) for analysis of discrete products. The work presented in this thesis builds on these unit process energy models and analysis framework to predict waste production in part manufacturing. In its present iteration, the software analysis tool is called WE-Fab, to indicate that it completes waste production and energy consumption accounting.

The unit process models that were developed for casting, cutting, machining, and welding, are described and used to compare the wasted production of product and process design alternatives through an illustrative example using WE-Fab for a generic product, and excavator stick, which was used for energy analysis in prior work. It is concluded that the WE-Fab software providesa framework for an approach for triple bottom line sustainability analysis during product design on the basis of unit manufacturing processes. However, much work is needed for the development of predictive models, communication linkages, and common metrics to continuously develop sustainable economic, environmental, and societal futures.

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