A novel design for assembly approach for modified topology of industrial products

Abstract

Recent advancements in materials and manufacturing processes are becoming difficult in day-to-day times to meet the industrial needs. Assembly is one of the processes in manufacturing, which takeover 20% of overall cost in manufacturing [5]. The assembly of the parts still becomes difficult, if the product consists of parts with more intricate shape. Design For Assembly (DFA) has driven product designers towards minimizing the number of parts in a product to reduce the assembly efforts and manufacturing cost. Until now, there is no generalized method to obtain modified topology of the product by DFA concept. Many industries like Toyota, Sony and many more follow their own designed DFA methodology. Generalization of DFA concept to obtain the modified topology of the product involves high skilled user intervention and demands in deep knowledge of DFA principles. In this paper, an attempt is made to generate modified topology by generalizing the DFA concept. To generalize the DFA concept and to obtain the modified topology, the research work is mainly concentrated on four principles. 1) Material properties of the parts, 2) Relative motion between the parts, 3) Contact between the parts, 4) Functionality of the parts. Depending on these principles, a general methodology has been developed to obtain the modified topology of industrial products. The methodology has been successfully implemented on an industrial product to obtain modified topology with reduced part numbers.