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Case
Studies
Ensuring Product Reliability
Products are required to perform adequately for a specified time, under specified stresses, or in harsh environments. Many product designers and manufacturers have difficulty in ensuring that their products will perform properly for extended times and stresses. Each day there are product safety recalls and customer complaints in nearly every manufacturing industry. We have helped dozens of product designers in developing material specifications and dimensional specifications so that products will not fail prematurely.
We also quantify the times and stresses under which various percentages of components are estimated to fail. The benefits of this work include customer satisfaction, the avoidance of safety issues and recalls, and reduced warranty costs.
The types of products we have helped design and improve include automotive components, consumer products, medical devices, materials, industrial equipment, and more.
Achieving Target Performance Characteristics in Products
Most products must meet highly specific requirements. For example, products must be acceptable with regard to strength, dimensional values, optics, appearance, roundness, torque, weld integrity, and so on. Often, manufacturing operations have difficulties achieving these product performance targets due to excessive variation in materials, equipment, human operations, the environment, and so on. In other cases, a manufacturer does not know the optimal values for production settings such as equipment speeds, pressures, temperatures, cycle times, loads, and so on.
We work with manufacturing personnel to quickly identify optimal operating settings. Furthermore, we help manufacturers understand which sources of variation are most important to control. Using sensitivity analysis, we identify how small changes in operating settings impact the performance of products. The immediate savings we provide usually range from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars.
“Multi-Response Optimization”
Most products need to meet several requirements. When engineers and scientists develop a design and a manufacturing process to optimize an important performance feature of the product, it might be at the expense of another product characteristic. For example, a product might require an adhesive and maximum adhesion is desirable. However, in maximizing the adhesion, the part becomes distorted. To make matters more complicated, management wants to produce the part as cost-effectively as possible.
Now, there are at least 3 “responses” to optimize. Adhesion should be maximized, distortion should be minimized, and cost should be minimized. However, in order to minimize distortion, adhesion is sacrificed. The question is: Can we simultaneously achieve acceptable values for adhesion, distortion, and cost? Integral Concepts professionals routinely answer these types of questions and deliver many solutions.
Aircraft Engine Component Failing in Flight
A critical aircraft engine component failed during flight in dozens of small airplanes. The Federal Aviation Administration grounded several thousand of these aircraft as a result. We analyzed data using statistical methods such as regression analysis, ANOVA, and reliability analysis to determine that the weakest components were associated with a particular material chemistry and processing method.
Noise, Vibration, Harshness (NVH) in Automobile Systems
Automakers want their vehicles to be reasonably quiet for drivers. In order to accomplish this, the automakers require that automotive suppliers produce quiet components. We help design many automotive systems so that they perform well without contributing much noise to a vehicle assembly. In some projects, the component must insulate the vehicle from excessive external noise.
“Concept to Customer” Optimization
In our competitive environment, getting a new product to the marketplace as quickly and flawlessly as possible is essential. Researchers, scientists, and engineers spend significant amounts of time trying to develop products with certain beneficial properties.
We help researchers, scientists, and engineers develop new products much more quickly through the judicious use of many types of experimental designs. Not only do we help R&D develop new products more quickly, but we also apply methods that ensure that the products will perform well in a marketplace—under a wide variety of different conditions.
Risk Assessment
Often, government agencies will question the safety of consumer products, vehicles, foods, drugs, automobiles, and so on. Several issues may arise. For example, how many people or products are at risk? Is this risk similar to the risk of competing products? Is risk being assess fairly—or is the assessment biased against a manufacturer?
For example, consumers may complain that a particular product caused an injury. They may complain that the Company A’s product is unsafe. However, there are several issues that need to be investigated. First, did the product cause the injury, or did the operator misuse the product. Second, is the complaint or injury rate for competitor’s product similar? Third, has “exposure” been accounted for?
By “exposure,” we mean that the more a product is used, and the more products that are in the market, the more opportunities consumers have to complain. So, in an unbiased analysis, “exposure” is properly accounted for.
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