Mechanical Engineering Commons^™

Eagle Medical Tray Denesting & Debris Removal Process, Nicholas Allen Ungefug, Noah Chavez, Susana Shu-Lin Okhuysen, Michael Augustine Pennington

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

Eagle Medical Incorporated is a contract medical device packaging and sterilization company. The company purchases thermoformed medical packaging trays, which maintain the sterility of medical devices, from various manufacturers. To ensure packaging quality and to prevent cleanroom contamination, Eagle Medical inspects and sterilizes each blister tray that they order. This process is an essential non-value-added activity that creates a bottleneck. Cleanroom employees must stop packaging medical devices and attend to the processing of blister trays and packaging solutions. The blister trays arrive at Eagle’s facility in nested stacks. Vibration and movement during shipping further compresses the stacks, which makes separation …

Thermal And Mechanical Numerical Modeling Of Extrusion-Based 3d Printed Reinforced Polymers For Selecting Manufacturing Process Parameters, Sunil Bhandari

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Extrusion-based 3D printing of thermoplastic polymer composites manufactures parts that have nonhomogenous, orthotropic, and process-dependent macro-scale material properties. As a part of the dissertation, research works were carried out to: • improve the interlayer mechanical properties and reduce the orthotropy, • use experimentally homogenized orthotropic material properties to numerically model the mechanical behavior of the non-homogenous orthotropic 3D printed parts, • create an efficient numerical thermal model to predict the process-dependent thermal history of the 3D printed part, and • aid the manufacturing process by selecting a suitable set of processing parameters based on a simplified sequentially coupled thermomechanical model. …

Finite Element Analysis Of Assembly For Warped Composite Automotive Components, Theogenes De Oliveira Maia

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

One of the most used processes in the automotive industry is the moulding of parts made of thermoplastics filled with glass fibres. This research focused on a specific material: long fibre thermoplastics (LFT). On the one hand, the performance gain, in terms of lightweight and the strength of final components, justifies its wide use. On the other hand, due to the intrinsic characteristics of part manufacturing, warpage is evident and can influence or even compromise subsequent stages of production.

This research has three main objectives: recreate in the most faithfully way, in Abaqus^TM environment, the conditions that precede the …

Impact Of Magnetocaloric Material Properties On Performance Of A Magnetocaloric Heat Pump., Michael G. Schroeder

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the field of magnetocaloric heat pumps much research has been performed around machine design and theoretical machines, but little has been researched around practical problems such as variability in material properties. The present work defines a simulation tool that has been proven with experimental data. Magnetocaloric material cascades were statistically analyzed and parameterized, such that they could be recreated parametrically using a split Lorentz function with normally distributed parameters. Correlated curve-defining values with standard deviations were used as input into the simulation tool to determine the effect of variation on cooling heat pump performance for a household refrigerator application. …

Modeling And Simulation Of The Thermoforming Process In Thermoplastic-Matrix Composite Materials, Philip M. Bean

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Thermoplastic-matrix composite materials have unique advantages over traditional thermosets including faster processing, improved fracture toughness, and recyclability. These and other benefits have caused increasing interest in the use of these materials in both aerospace and automotive industries. Due to the differences in behavior, these materials require a different type of manufacturing process to thermoset matrix composites. This manufacturing process generally involves using pre manufactured tape-layers. These layers, containing both thermoplastic-matrix and fiber-reinforcement, are aligned to the desired orientation, and stacked up into a “tailored blank” using an automated tape layup machine. They are then heated to the thermoplastic melting temperature …

A Scalable, Chunk-Based Slicer For Cooperative 3d Printing, Jace J. Mcpherson

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Cooperative 3D printing is an emerging technology that aims to increase the 3D printing speed and to overcome the size limit of the printable object by having multiple mobile 3D printers (printhead-carrying mobile robots) work together on a single print job on a factory floor. It differs from traditional layer-by-layer 3D printing due to requiring multiple mobile printers to work simultaneously without interfering with each other. Therefore, a new approach for slicing a digital model and generating commands for the mobile printers is needed, which has not been discussed in literature before. We propose a chunk-by-chunk based slicer that divides …

Connected Alerts Across Manufacturing Facilities, Jordan J. Moy

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

The lack of communication during a large project can result in costly delays when striving to achieve previously defined benchmarks. Often times, each part of a project will require verification from an employee of a specified area of expertise before being allowed to advance to the next stage. Finding these individuals can be extremely hard due to the large, spread out campus of manufacturing facilities as well as the numerous projects the company is concurrently working on. These floor support requests can sometimes take from an hour to even a whole work day, causing major delays in the production schedule. …

An Optimization Model For Operating Room Scheduling To Reduce Blocking Across The Perioperative Process, Amin Abedini, Wei Li, Honghan Ye

Mechanical Engineering Faculty Publications

Operating room (OR) scheduling is important. Because of increasing demand for surgical services, hospitals must provide high quality care more efficiently with limited resources. When constructing the OR schedule, it is necessary to consider the availability of downstream resources, such as intensive care unit (ICU) and post anaesthesia care unit (PACU). The unavailability of downstream resources causes blockings between every two consecutive stages. In this paper we address the master surgical schedule (MSS) problem in order to minimize blockings between two consecutive stages. First, we present a blocking minimization (BM) model for the MSS by using integer programming, based on …

Study On Growth Model Of Cellular Automata Method In Solidification Simulation, Zhao Guo, Jian-Xin Zhou, Ya-Jun Yin, Chang-Chang Liu

The 8th International Conference on Physical and Numerical Simulation of Materials Processing

No abstract provided.

Integration Of Advanced Simulation And Visualization For Material Processing, Chenn Zhou

The 8th International Conference on Physical and Numerical Simulation of Materials Processing

No abstract provided.

Microstructure Development Of Granular System During Compaction, Chen Shang, Marcial Gonzalez

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Granular materials is the second most manipulated material in the industry today. They are easy to transport and more and more newly developed materials cannot stand the process of traditional casting, like energetic materials and bio-materials, but will survive the powder compaction process. Having a better understanding of the microstructure development of granular systems during compaction process, especially for particles that will heavily deform under loading, will give an insight of how to better process the powders to produce materials with overall better performance comparing to bulk materials. The main theory and mechanism applied are Hertz law and nonlocal contact …

Simulation Of An Intake Manifold Pre-Heater For Cold Diesel Engine Startup, Patrick K. Kreun

Masters Theses

Ensuring consistent, reliable diesel engine startups in cold temperatures is of utmost importance in a number of applications. Under extreme temperatures, the use of glow plugs is complemented by intake manifold heaters. In these, the energy released from combustion increases the intake air temperature before the air enters the main combustion chamber. Since the process also alters the stoichiometry of the fuel-air mixture at the intake ports, the preheater operation must be optimized in order to guarantee successful and reliable in-cylinder combustion during engine startups. This paper describes the development of an intake manifold model incorporating an air pre-heater for …

Integrating Value Stream Mapping And Simulation, Michelle E. Scullin

Theses and Dissertations

An important principle in Lean manufacturing, value stream mapping (VSM) can be helpful in understanding how process flow and information flow affect each other. A VSM is a static picture of a process that allows the user to see where value is added into the value stream. Simulation is used to evaluate the behavioral issues of processes. In a manufacturing realm this means simulation shows how each operation affects other operations so determinations can be made about where bottlenecks or other problems exist in the process. Theoretically, the integration of VSM and Simulation can aide in process improvement by showing …

A Tool Wear Comparative Study In Turning Versus Computer Simulation In 1018 Steel, Woodrow D. Miner

Theses and Dissertations

The material removal process uses cutting tools in order to produce the desired shape of the workpiece. Tool wear has been a problem for cutting tools, since cutting tools wear and break. Research has been accomplished in the tool wear field for tool life and more recently tool wear. The computer generation has created a method to simulate the material removal process. These computer simulations model the cutting tool reaction with the workpiece. Many of the simulation models use finite element analysis to calculate the reaction of the cutting tool. Different finite element models are being used throughout the world …

A Finite Element Simulation Of Temperature And Material Flow In Fricton Stir Welding, Mark J. Lasley

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this research was to use the Transvalor S.A. product, Forge3, to develop a finite element simulation of the friction stir welding process that improves the predictability of temperature evolution and material flow within the plunge portion of the process. Previous modeling created more heating within the billet than experimental results, probably due to the simplification of the simulation with adiabatic boundary conditions. More realistic tooling temperatures were included in this model as these affect heat evolution which is a determining factor in microcrystalline growth. These results were validated by experimental efforts using a billet and tooling instrumented …

The Benefit Of Using Simulation To Improve The Implementation Of Lean Manufacturing Case Study: Quick Changeovers To Allow Level Loading Of The Assembly Line, Jack J. Mcclellan

Theses and Dissertations

In today's competitive manufacturing environment, companies are constantly looking for ways to improve. Because of this, many companies are striving to become "lean" by implementing lean manufacturing, which is a difficult process. To aid in the implementation of lean manufacturing, simulation was used to reduce the trial-and-error period of lean manufacturing and find to optimum approach to implement the lean manufacturing principle. In this research, a case study of implementing level loading of the production schedule for BullFrog International, L.C. will be examined. To make it possible to implement level loading, the thermo-former machine at the beginning of the operations …

An Integrated Approach To Simulation And Activity-Based Costing For Evaluating Alternative Manufacturing Cell Designs, Robert Williams, Paul Savory, Rodney Rasmussen

Department of Industrial and Management Systems Engineering: Faculty Publications

One effective technique for improving manufacturing efficiency involves the application of group technology part families and manufacturing cells. Selection of the best or optimum configuration of the manufacturing cell relies on the experience and judgment of the cell designer. This paper describes how activity-based costing (ABC) concepts can be integrated into a discrete-event simulation model and be used to evaluate manufacturing cell configurations. The output of the combined ABC simulation model provides a detailed “Bill of Activity” which allows the cell designer to consider costs as a critical factor in the cell design problem. Alternative cell configurations studied in this …