Endurance Limit

Posted on August 7, 2015 by george

Going on forever has always been a dream of mankind

ENDURANCE LIMIT

In fatigue testing, the maximum stress which can be applied to a material for an infinite number of stress cycles without resulting in failure of the material

Mc Graw-Hill Dictionary of Architecture and Construction Copyright @ 2003

We reached a new milestone. The average age of registered cars in the US is now 11.5 years. This is probably the high water mark. There are a number of factors behind this assertion.
(1) The automakers are only required to stock service parts for 10 years. This means that it might not be possible to get repair parts for more than 1/2 the cars that are on the road in the portion of the vehicle life that they are needed.(Aftermarket repair parts are available for most high volume models- usually only about 2/3 of the cars made). Purchasing a used Smart car because it has an attractive price, may not look so smart after it is 10 years old and no service parts are available.
(2) The economy is slowly improving.
(3) Probably most significant is that the government imposed rapid fuel economy improvement targets. To meet those targets, the current crop of new cars is being built out of light weight materials that have not been in vehicle use for 10 years.

Today’s fuel efficient cars are made from lightweight materials that do not have a longevity history.
Picture by Joe Bain-Car Crash

As manufacturers we are attracted to the advantages of processing plastics. Most of the smoke and dirt associated with creating parts out of metal disappears. The lower processing temperatures of plastics opens the door for robotic “lights out” plants. The big disadvantage is that plastics do not have an endurance limit. When you wish to buy a car that has a 11.5 year average operating life, you hope that it is made out of materials that can withstand the millions of imposed stress cycles that it will see during that life. The cars that are on the road today have skeletons that are mostly made of steel. Steel has an endurance limit. It is possible to apply stresses infinitely below a certain value without damaging the part. Having just replaced a plastic rear door handle, I can report first hand that it is just a matter of time before the plastic car parts are operated beyond their life. Having started my career as a suspension design engineer, I suspect that the recent crop of record breaking recalls, such as the Jeep suspension recall, are just the the vanguard of the flood.

The average age of US owner occupied housing is 34 years. About one third of that housing is 40 to 70 years old. Fortunately, much of the pressurized plumbing in the oldest housing is steel. Aside from the tendency to rust, it will not fail due to the contained pressure. We have grown accustomed to the reliability of the copper plumbing in the majority of our housing. In my experience it is not 100% free of leaks, but they are rare. Plastic plumbing is the most common material for new construction today. In normal chicken and egg fashion we will not know which of the various plastics used in the latest plumbing will have the expected 70 year life until the time has past. Due to the fact that I am currently recovering from a complete separation of a plastic connection within a five year old sink faucet, I can confidently predict that some evolution of design and material is still required. (I witnessed a wide open pipe making a flood like this picture)

Water leaks can seriously damage a home

We normally shut off the main water valve to our house when we are out of town. This is a good thing in that the plastic ice maker feed line leaked upon re-pressurization the last time we returned. I wonder if there is an emerging market for an automatic water shut off valve to prevent leaks from going undetected while the home is unoccupied?

Additive Manufacturing

Posted on June 19, 2015 by george

Your morning coffee delivered in a cup made using additive manufacturing

The value of additive manufacturing has long been known to the human race. Early civilization discovered the benefits of layering clay to create the pottery containers that we use for every day life. Most of us do not give a second thought to the pottery cups that deliver our morning coffee. Linking a coffee cup to additive manufacturing might not be obvious even if you work in the factory that makes coffee cups. A coffee cup factory is all about making an identical copy for everyone. After a coffee cup is designed using additive manufacturing, it is given to the pattern makers. Their precision wood patterns capture the shapes and serve to guide the creation of molds and tooling. This became the backbone of industrial manufacturing until the 1990s when the mathematics within the CAD and CAM programs evolved to replace wood patterns.

Wood patterns have been replaced by 3D CAD models.

Some of the bits of craftsmanship such as the “S” shaped gear spokes that keep the gear round during casting cooling have been lost from modern designs. The STEM skills required for the shape definition task are unchanged even though the practitioners are now called CAD modelers instead of pattern makers. The commercially useful shapes still require corner radii and fillets. Fits, blends, dimensional accuracy and finishes are even more important. As we evolve to a mass customization marketplace more people with this skill will be required.
Convergence is a term used to describe the effect that advancements in computer technology is having on the communications industry. The line between telephone, television broadcast, radio, paging, security, satellite, cable, and internet companies is blurring. The same is happening in additive manufacturing. A robot arc welder heats material fed as a wire and fuses it in a predetermined position controlled by a multiaxis CNC control. Interestingly enough, this is the exact description of what happens in filament style 3D printing.

ROBCAD Offline teaching welding
001 by KOMATSU Ltd
Airwolf 3D printer by Neon Tommy

As we evolve away from one size fits all, it will become possible to manufacture locally the items that we want. Computer controls will add the necessary flexibility to the production equipment that we own and recognize.

Battery Assault

Posted on June 19, 2015 by george

by Reynardo Detroit Electric 1917 taken in Maffra, Vic

“I sell here, Sir, what all the world desires to have – POWER”, Matthew Boulton. From the infancy of the industrial revolution where Matthew promoted his steam engine, we humans wanted to encapsulate power in our hands. In the early 1900s electric cars running on lead acid batteries vied with the early unreliable internal combustion engines. Now, 100 years later, we mostly use vehicles powered by internal combustion engines, but a few remaining vehicles, such as lift trucks and Kiva robots, are powered by lead acid batteries. Lead acid battery life is still an issue. For example, Kiva (now Amazon robotics) robots, require brand new batteries every year.
Modern electronics ratcheted up the demand for portable sources of electric power. When I used my HP45 calculator, the nickle cadmium cells in the battery pod drove most users nuts.

HP45 by Daniel Sancho

As an engineer, I replaced cells in the pods as they died from military surplus. Never figured out what caused this highly variable battery life. Some died the first week, others went for a year or longer. Market pain of this level spurred heavy development effort, which resulted in the NiMH (Nickel Metal Hydride) battery. The highly toxic cadmium electrode was replaced by an intermetallic electrode, which in the most effective versions includes rare earth elements. This improvement tripled battery storage capacity (almost equaling lithium ion) A few marketplace knee jerk reactions occurred. Chevron bought the patent and blocked NiMH battery use in electric vehicles. NiMH use in hybrid vehicles was approved, because they still run on gasoline. The driving range of a Prius in electric only is about 1 mile. The Tesla end run using lithium batteries, probably caused the NiMH patent sale to BASF in 2012. The Chinese leveraged their short term monopoly on rare earth supply for political purposes.

Prius by JBleeker

When the Prius first came out the automotive engineering community believed that a short NiMH battery life would be its downfall. Slamming power in and out at variable ambient temperatures is exactly opposite to what is optimum for extending battery life. NiMH battery life proved better than our concern, but is still a factor. Smash and grab thieves currently target Prius battery packs, because they can get $1000 for a used pack when an owner is faced with a $2500 replacement after about five years of use.
We enthusiastically adopted the convenience of laptops when the intersection of lower power usage computer chips coincided with lighter weight lithium battery development.

Laptop Computer

Lithium batteries take advantage of the fact that lithium is the lightest metal. Unfortunately, all high density energy storage materials are a fire hazard. We have heard about lithium battery fires in laptops, planes and even Tesla cars. Our familiarity with normal cars causes us to forget that gasoline fires in cars are also very common. Most lithium battery makers are still focusing on electrode development in that battery life is still a frustration.
Based on a successful trial, Eos has just received third round funding for their grid scale zinc air battery. http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/eos-raising-25m-to-build-megawatts-of-low-cost-grid-batteries They are working with Con Edison to replace coal fired peaking power plants with batteries. It takes a whole lot of batteries.

Modular ZInc Air in Sea Land
picture of Big Bend Power Station by Wkniught94 talk
container picture by Marc Cromme, Denmark

In modern logistic fashion, they package their batteries with the control electronics in sea-land containers. A multitude of these containers equals a power plant. The Eos battery evolved from the zinc dry cell that every one knows. Hearing aid manufacturers needed an affordable light weight battery to create a comfortable unit. The design of the dry cell was evolved to gather one reaction agent from the air. Most people do not realize this is similar to a gasoline engine which burns 10 lbs of air for every one pound of gasoline. Gasoline engine cars would be heavy, like Tesla electrics (4000 lb vrs 2000 lb), if they also had to carry the air that is burned. Eos evolved the zinc air battery further to create a rechargeable battery with a long life. This innovation cut the cost of storing electrical energy in batteries by 50 percent. Most of the electrical vehicle manufactures have taken notice and it would not surprise me if all electric vehicle manufacturers use zinc air for some portion of their batteries.
Batteries are encapsulating power in our hands. The cordless drills, shavers, weed eaters, vacuums, lawn mowers, snow blowers that we enjoy, are just the spin off benefits.

Cobots

Posted on June 7, 2015 by george

C3P0 Model at Comic-Con by Ewen Roberts

Science fiction writers have given us a glimpse into the future. I can picture a time beyond my lifetime where we have advanced our robot technology to the point where a robot can be created in human form and work along side us. Certainly Star Wars caught all of our imaginations. The starting point for Collaborative Robots (COBOTS) was a lot more mundane. Early robots, like Unimate, were prone to deviate occasionally or drift from their programmed path. Our safety standards evolved to compensate for this short coming by enclosing them in locked bullet proof cages. Like wayward children, we had them play in their own sandbox. We were content to avoid joining the robots in their sandbox because most of the earliest robot applications were chosen because the robot was in a dirty and dangerous sandbox. The 6 axis electric robots that replaced the first hydraulic Unimates were more reliable, but still were less than perfectly safe. This history colored our vision of what a robot should look like. Innovation usually comes at us from the fringe, tearing up the “rule book” in the process. The Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner is a good example

First generation Roomba (Roomba is a trademark of iRobot) by Larry D. Moore

It doesn’t look like a robot. It doesn’t even look like a vacuum. As one of the early Cobots it could safely work side by side with humans without danger. Cats — We are less sure about them, based on some funny Youtube video showing how they react to Roomba vacuums. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mk4XB2wZqF4 This early cobot spawned a few commercial derivatives to tackle what my wife’s grandmother called uphill work. This is work like laundry that you finish this week, just in time to start again at the beginning next week. As a teenager I did some of that running an industrial floor scrubber for my aunt’s janitorial business. No matter how good a job you did cleaning the floor one night, the floor started just as dirty the next night.

T5 walk-behind floor scrubber by Tennant (left) and HydroBot floor scrubbing robot by Intellibot Robotics picture by Z22

The robotic scrubber does not consider this task a dead end job like I did. A new template for robots emerged. AGVs (Autonomous Guided Vehicles) sprouted into wide spread use. Their slow speeds and limited range of motions enabled co habitation of working space with humans.

Packmobile with trailer AGV, Egemin Automation picture by AGVExpertJS

It could be argued that the first versions of AGVs were not full robots because they simply tracked a wire buried in the floor. Evolved AGVs such as the Kiva robots that Amazon uses to accomplish same day delivery are full Cobots. Even though Amazon got a jump on the rest of the industry by the strategic purchase of Kiva, competition is beginning to emerge http://netonomy.net/2015/04/29/three-robots-that-will-change-ecommerce/. In much the same fashion that Roomba came in at the fringe, the need for a robot that could work side by side with a human ushered in the gantry style robot. The gantry has predictable X Y Z motions with hard end stops which eliminates the need for the bullet proof cage. The space advantage of a Cobot makes it my favorite choice when implementing an automotive cell. I am particularly proud of a jet engine turbine blade inspection machine that uses ultrasonics to detect cracked blades before they fail.

New Automation Ultrasonic Jet Engine blade
inspection machine

Honda thinks the same way and I was not surprised when I saw a gantry robot carrying cylinder heads between machining stations at their Alabama assembly plant. The electronics industry is faced with the same issues of mixing automated and human assembly. They also have adopted gantry style cobots for their surface mount technology

Internals of a Juki KE2010L 4 head pick and place surface mount machine. the machine is used to place electronic components that are soldered to the face of a printed circuit board rather than having leads go through holes in the board. The machine is loaded with standard 8″ reels on mechanical feeders (front right) and a tray of QFP microprocessors (rear center) Picture by Peripitus

Technology will advance to the point where we can build a C3P0 Cobot. It will happen as a step by step evolution. We are on our way. Currently in the lab are vision, tactile and capacitive skin collision sensors which will become affordable.

Packaged 3D

Posted on May 31, 2015 by george

A chocolate assortment in a vacuformed tray by Evan-Amos

Life could be a box of chocolates. The challenge in this era of mass customization is that the assortment of flavors that we want to buy changes with the wind. If you look at the picture carefully you will discover that the pockets match the shape of the chocolates. This means that if you want to change the assortment you require a new mold. The associates filling the box also find it hard to adapt to continuously and randomly changing customer order. It would also be helpful if the vacuum molded tray had some visual management labels to guide in the fulfillment activity.
Enter 3D printing. Invisalign pioneered the use of 3D printed molds to shape plastic sheet.

Vacuformed orthodontics are shaped over 3D printed molds by Smikey lo

Since every retainer created is different, the 3D printing process also molds into each item identification information. Why did Invisalign choose plastic sheet?
From the earliest blacksmiths shaping swords, the engineering community has discovered that it is possible to increase material strength if the application does not need the high strength in all directions. The bio-compatible plastic used by Invisalign actually works as a retainer, whereas the 3D printed plastic used to make the mold is too brittle and you would not catch me sticking it in my mouth because it still contains active plastic precursors. Other plastic composite sheet can be even stronger because reinforcing fibers can be laminated into the mix

Fibers add strength to plastics and rubber by PerOX

For example pneumatic car tires must have embedded fiber reinforcement to withstand the applied forces. Airplane manufacture is a logistic nightmare. About 100,000 parts must be manufactured and gathered together in the right order to make a plane come together. The Boeing engineers joke that FISH (first in still here) has replaced FIFO (first in first out) as their accounting system. Boeing in their Moonshine Project determined that staged delivery to the assembly floor is more that sending the parts. The parts themselves are useless without the matching tools to install them. In their historic system workers spent much of their working day traveling back and forth to the tool cabinets around the working area. As we gain engineering control, the implementation of molded tool trays on 3d printed molds is an effective shadow board so that it becomes possible visually to determine in the warehouse that all of the required tools are sent with each cart of parts.

747 airplane parts and tools are delivered together by Jeff McNeill from Chiang Mai, Thailand

Some of the solution for the shortage in transportation capacity has to come from efficiency. It would be easier if the marketplace didn’t want mass customization at the same time. I can picture us evolving to 3D print to order shipping trays so that full density skid size loads can be assembled upstream enabling fast loading and less unprofitable empty space in transit.

Mass Customization

Posted on May 12, 2015 by george

One Size Fits All

This may sound corny but we live in the land of plenty. As Michael Pollen, the author of “Cooked”, puts it “If you are what you eat, and especially if you eat industrial food, as 99 percent of Americans do, what you are is ‘corn.'” http://www.ecoliteracy.org/essays/we-are-what-we-eat

Eat your cornflakes

But I don’t want to be corn. This is where the trend of mass customization it setting in. The industrial revolution was all about creating factories that could deliver massive quantities of identical product so that everyone could have some. The logistics system delivered full skid loads of boxes of cornflakes which populated the grocery shelves. The advent of computerized ERP has changed all of that. We now want to head to the store and grab the flavor of Gatorage that suits our fancy.

by Sarah Afshar – My love for Gatorade goes beyond

We just expect that the shelf will be restocked with the correct flavor without giving a second thought how the modern computerized ERP systems orchestrate that action on a JIT (Just In Time) basis triggered by scanning at the cash register. The plant that bottles Gatorade does not want to have any food remaining at the end of production each day to control bugs and pests. I am happy about that because it is a whole lot better method than using pesticides that could end up in the food we eat. Since the buying public is unpredictable the ERP system has to assemble a list for the the food warehouse of the needed flavors and quantities. The warehouse assembles (kitting) skids of the correct flavors of 80 lb gastorade concentrate packages in production sequence (in e-commerce this is called fulfillment)

Operators need a lifting device to assemble skids of heavy product

A delivery run is made each day so that the correct raw materials are available at the start of each production day at the bottling plant. This is just one stop on the milk run that delivers ERP kitted bulk food products from the warehouse in the working day. We all got tired of eating cornflakes every day. Computer directed mass customization systems delivery the variety of goods that we want to the store shelves

Mechanic Shortage

Posted on March 1, 2015 by george

Oleg-Little bike mechanic Greyson

We probably will see an end to the Mechanic shortage when the little Greysons of the world enter the workforce. In the interim the retiring baby boomer multi-craft maintenance technicians are leaving a big hole in the workforce. It would be nice to think that the workers entering the market could instantly fill the hole. The reality is that the retiring workers gathered their broad spectrum skill over a lifetime in the field. As a double whammy the adoption of automation as a solution to other competitive issues has expanded the need for maintenance mechanics.
Most people still in the manufacturing game are well aware of the problem. The question is what to do about it. I have elected to list a few avenues to consider.
1) Factory rebuilds. Ralph Nader in his ignorance made planned obsolescence a generally known term. As engineers we are proud of our ability to design products with a known lifetime. This term can be good or bad depending on whether you are trying to use mechanical items beyond their design life. Smart business people recognize the benefit of rebuilding back to better than new on a planned schedule. For example the life expectancy of the first rebuild of a diesel 18 wheel truck engine exceeds the life of the original engine. Trying to staff enough maintenance talent on the third shift or weekend to keep equipment past its planned life running is a losing battle
2) Offsite maintenance. The thing I like best about Kiva Robots is their interchangeability. If you are automating a warehouse it is not necessary to hire a large staff of robot mechanics. These items can be sent offsite and quickly replaced with identical replacements. Many industrial trucks and lift trucks fit into the same category. Contrast this with central conveyor systems that shut the plant down if any section is not operational.

Photo courtesy of Colin&Claire
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

3) Autonomous Maintenance. In today’s lean environment we have to get past the notion that only maintenance craftsmen are capable of keeping the plant running. Operators know their work area best. Systems can be put in place to guide each operator in performing actions which prolong equipment life and improve uptime.
4) 5S. Shine is a key factor in keeping equipment operating reliably. Many times a repair is nothing more that cleaning within the mechanisms. The time for making a repair is diminished if the mechanic does not also have to clean the outside.
5) Team maintenance. Scarce multicraft technicians are a lot more productive if they have an assigned helper. This effective strategy also is helpful is broadening the skills of apprentices.
6) Scheduled Maintenance Free. Smart business people are purchasing items that require less maintenance. I was talking to a Tesla owner who only changed tires after three years of heavy driving. This is possibly why they do not need a dealer network. Wesley an industrial truck builder changed to flat-free aperature tires and maintenance free batteries to offer a vehicle without scheduled maintenance.
7)HMI. (Human Machine Interface) Much the same way that it is next to impossible to fix your car without obtaining the error codes, the computers attached to modern production equipment need to identify what is wrong.

Wingman

Posted on August 2, 2014 by george

Who is watching your back?

In this high tech world it is comforting to know that you have angels looking over your shoulder. For example you have a computer wingman driving with you every mile of the way. You won’t believe me until you try to drive a Model T where the spark advance is controlled by the driver using a lever attached to the steering wheel. It is very easy to stall the engine each and every shift by getting the spark advance wrong. Technology done right, like computer controlled spark advance, is user invisible.

Ford Model T opened driving to the masses

We all get frustrated with new technology that requires the skill of a rocket scientist to operate. Robotic and CNC manufacturing machinery that was introduced in the 90’s fit in that category. The computer processor in that equipment was barely able to keep up with running the equipment and did not have any leftover capacity to assist the user. The good news is that we can now afford lots of computer capacity as Moore’s law predicted. Multiple large capacity computers are embedded into just about everything we currently create.

The secret is in creating useful tasks for these computers to do. A computerized “wingman”, who bridges the gap between the bits and byte and the user is one of the most helpful tasks. I work with Wesley an industrial vehicle builder who offers an autonomous tug vehicle. This technology would not have the market interest or acceptance if it required a rocket scientist to purpose it for the task. The embedded “wingman” in the computer control enables a normal warehouse worker to program a delivery, simply by driving the route it the first time. Other good examples of invisible computerized “wingmen” include the Milage Trakker http://mileagetrakker.com plugged into my car that collects and tabulates the mileage that I drive without me having to think about it. It also understands and interprets the engine error codes with information provided real time to my smart phone.

I am not sure that I pictured the angel looking over my shoulder as a R2-D2 robot. As computers invade every aspect of our lives I am beginning to believe that this is exactly what I need.

New and Shiney

Posted on April 5, 2014 by george

A little over a year ago I was in a meeting with one of my business partners discussing how to react to the new marketing reality. The traditional sales approach of cold calling and sending out salesmen to land the sale by educating the customer was no longer working. Refreshing our website and adding a timely blog, following the pundits of the day made no difference. I suspect that adding a proliferation of data on the web only made our competitors more knowledgeable.

Innovation turned out to be the answer. It has to be a financially useful innovation. No, adding pink polka dots, while innovative, does not add real value. And you cannot skip the work of doing the A-B testing to demonstrate that the customer agrees that the “improvement” beneficially changes the total cost of ownership. . We discovered that in this recovery, hidden in the background are a whole lot of innovations that actually improve the total cost of ownership, as seen by the customer. In this case, Tesla style lithium batteries, driverless controls and flat free aperture style tires changed the economics entirely.

The information on all of these wonderful innovations is out there on the web. Information overload applies. None of us has the time to sort through the myriads of web information to separate the wheat from the chaff. Enter the traditional role of the salesmen with the latest twist. The customers want more than just catalogs of information. Salesmen, who can provide them with the guidance on how the latest innovations will improve their operational costs, clinch the sale. A resultant 30% sales growth by my partner shows that this pivot finally was in the right direction.

The pace of innovation is so great that even I get blind sided. After making a $200,000 annual saving last year using the new surface technology, I felt smug. A thin layer of very high cost materials are grown on the surface of cheaper materials. In certain applications this is all that is needed to make the material perform like it was entirely made of the more expensive material. A business partner called me about a new customer application in the same category. The Lord must have been looking after me, because I elected to defer to my expert. This is a good thing because I would have missed a new innovation that doubles the saving because it just was developed in the last 5 years. It is all out there on the web but I did not know where to look or that I should be looking.

Salesmen are more important then ever. In this climate the best help your team can provide is a new and shiney innovative item to break down the customer doors.

3D Printing – An Invisible Revolution

Gallery

Posted on September 10, 2013 by george

This gallery contains 5 photos.

3D PRINTING, a current hot news item, is actually the result of a gradual, almost invisible revolution in mold making which has finally reached a transformative point. The point where it can revolutionize the manufacture of equipment, like stock chasers, … Continue reading →

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