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"Who could have predicted?" This is heard
often during the launch of a new manufacturing and assembly
process designed to deliver a wonderful new product to the
consumer market. The joining of rigid parts with compliant or
flexible parts often leads to unanticipated misalignments and
other dimensional variations that accumulate and are
increasingly compounded as the product moves down the assembly
line. Dimensional Control Systems (DCS) and the University of
Wisconsin-Madison will develop Stream-of-Variation Analysis (SOVA)
to eliminate most of the costly trial-and-error fine-tuning of
new-product assembly processes attributable to these
unforeseen dimensional errors. SOVA, a modeling, analysis,
synthesis and process control software system for variation
management of multistage manufacturing processes, is intended
to be a widely useful tool-set to be used throughout the
assembly process from design through production. Implemented
during the product design phase, the software will produce
math-based predictions of potential downstream assembly
problems, based on evaluations of the design and a large array
of process variables. By integrating product and process
design in a pre-production simulation, SOVA can head off
individual assembly errors that contribute to an accumulating
set of dimensional variations, which ultimately result in
out-of-tolerance parts and products. Once in the ramp-up stage
of production, SOVA will be able to compare predicted
misalignments with actual measurements to determine the degree
of mismatch in the assemblies, diagnose the root causes of the
errors, isolate the sources from other assembly steps, and
then, on the basis of the SOVA model and product measurements,
recommend solutions. These analytical, predictive and
diagnostic capabilities are enabled by new variation modeling
research by DCS and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. If
transferred to the manufacturing sector, such tools would
deliver major benefits in terms of cost savings, productivity
and quality improvements, and shortened product development
cycles. For more information please see
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http://www.3dcs.com/sova.html. |
