Continuous maintenance and the future – Foundations and technological challenges

High value and long life products require continuous maintenance throughout their life cycle to achieve required performance with optimum through-life cost. This paper presents foundations and technologies required to offer the maintenance service. Component and system level degradation science, assessment and modelling along with life cycle ‘big data’ analytics are the two most important knowledge and skill base required for the continuous maintenance. Advanced computing and visualisation technologies will improve efficiency of the maintenance and reduce through-life cost of the product. Future of continuous maintenance within the Industry 4.0 context also identifies the role of IoT, standards and cyber security

A comparison of processing techniques for producing prototype injection moulding inserts.

This project involves the investigation of processing techniques for producing low-cost moulding inserts used in the particulate injection moulding (PIM) process. Prototype moulds were made from both additive and subtractive processes as well as a combination of the two. The general motivation for this was to reduce the entry cost of users when considering PIM. PIM cavity inserts were first made by conventional machining from a polymer block using the pocket NC desktop mill. PIM cavity inserts were also made by fused filament deposition modelling using the Tiertime UP plus 3D printer. The injection moulding trials manifested in surface finish and part removal defects. The feedstock was a titanium metal blend which is brittle in comparison to commodity polymers. That in combination with the mesoscale features, small cross-sections and complex geometries were considered the main problems. For both processing methods, fixes were identified and made to test the theory. These consisted of a blended approach that saw a combination of both the additive and subtractive processes being used. The parts produced from the three processing methods are investigated and their respective merits and issues are discussed

Integrating IVHM and asset design

Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM) describes a set of capabilities that enable effective and efficient maintenance and operation of the target vehicle. It accounts for the collecting of data, conducting analysis, and supporting the decision-making process for sustainment and operation. The design of IVHM systems endeavours to account for all causes of failure in a disciplined, systems engineering, manner. With industry striving to reduce through-life cost, IVHM is a powerful tool to give forewarning of impending failure and hence control over the outcome. Benefits have been realised from this approach across a number of different sectors but, hindering our ability to realise further benefit from this maturing technology, is the fact that IVHM is still treated as added on to the design of the asset, rather than being a sub-system in its own right, fully integrated with the asset design. The elevation and integration of IVHM in this way will enable architectures to be chosen that accommodate health ready sub-systems from the supply chain and design trade-offs to be made, to name but two major benefits. Barriers to IVHM being integrated with the asset design are examined in this paper. The paper presents progress in overcoming them, and suggests potential solutions for those that remain. It addresses the IVHM system design from a systems engineering perspective and the integration with the asset design will be described within an industrial design process