Quality engineering of a traction alternator by robust design

Robust design is an engineering methodology for improving productivity during research and development so that high-quality products can be developed and produced quickly and at low cost. A large electrical company was developing traction alternators for a diesel electrical engine. Customer requirement was to obtain very high efficiency which, in turn, was influenced by several design parameters. The usual approach of the 'design-build-test' cycle was considered time-consuming and costly; it used to take anywhere from 4 months to 1 year before finalizing the product design parameters as it involved physical assembly and also testing. Instead, the authors used Taguchi's parameter design approach. This approach took about 8 weeks to arrive at optimum design parameter values; clearly demonstrating the cutting edge of this methodology over the traditional design-build-test approach. The prototype built and tested accordingly gave satisfactory overall performance, meeting and even exceeding customer requirements

Conceptual robustness in simultaneous engineering: An extension of Taguchi's parameter design

Simultaneous engineering processes involve multifunctional teams; team members simultaneously make decisions about many parts of the product-production system and aspects of the product life cycle. This paper argues that such simultaneous distributed decisions should be based on communications about sets of possibilities rather than single solutions. By extending Taguchi's parameter design concepts, we develop a robust and distributed decision-making procedure based on such communications. The procedure shows how a member of a design team can make appropriate decisions based on incomplete information from the other members of the team. More specifically, it (1) treats variations among the designs considered by other members of the design team as conceptual noise; (2) shows how to incorporate such noises into decisions that are robust against these variations; (3) describes a method for using the same data to provide preference information back to the other team members; and (4) provides a procedure for determining whether to release the conceptually robust design or to wait for further decisions by others. The method is demonstrated by part of a distributed design process for a rotary CNC milling machine. While Taguchi's approach is used as a starting point because it is widely known, these results can be generalized to use other robust decision techniques.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/45879/1/163_2005_Article_BF01608400.pd

The influence of deposition parameters on production of soft Fe 81\mathsf{_{81}} Co 13.5\mathsf{_{13.5}} Si 3.5\mathsf{_{3.5}} C 2\mathsf{_{2}} and Fe 67\mathsf{_{67}} Co 18\mathsf{_{18}} Si 1\mathsf{_{1}} B 14\mathsf{_{14}} films

Production parameters are important for the production of desirable type of magnetic materials. The feasibility of low coercivity amorphous films production using a novel rotating cryostat (RC) technique for sensor application was investigated. Fe 81 Co 13.5 Si 3.5 C2 and Fe 67 Co 18 Si 1B 14 amorphous films was vaporised using a resistively heated furnace on to a liquid nitrogen cooled polyimide Kapton $^{\rm TM}$ substrate rotated at the speed of 1300 rpm. The Orthogonal design process was applied in order to systematically optimise the deposition process and parameters over the output functions for the production of low coercivity films. The results indicate that the process can be easily optimised at these level settings with the goal of having the low coercivity amorhous films. By comparing the output function differences with standard deviation for coercivity, the effects of all input parameters (furnace shape, furnace power, mass of material and the gap between substrate and source) on coercivity values of films were analysed. Furthermore, the amorphous nature of these films was confirmed by X-ray measurement. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin/Heidelberg 2004

<b style="">Establishment and Economic evaluation of micropropagated <i style="">Jeewanti</i> (<i>Leptadenia reticulata</i> Wight & Arn.) plants in field </b><b style=""></b>

311-314 Leptadenia reticulata Wight & Arn. is an important medicinal plant. There is heavy demand of the plant and its biomass which can not be fulfilled by the natural/ present practices of propagation. Natural propagation of this plant is poor and the plant is threatened in nature. Thus, there is a need for applying biotechnological methods for large scale propagation. Micropropagation studies were carried out by the authors on explants. Multiple shoots were differentiated on Murashige and Skoog’s (MS) medium containing 5.0 mg/litre 6-benzylaminopurine (BAP). The shoots further multiplied on MS medium + 1.5 mg/litre BAP and 0.5 mg/litre kinetin (KN) and the cloned shoots, treated with 200 mg/litre of Indole-3-butyric acid (IBA), rooted ex vitro. The plantlets were transferred to bottles containing soilrite moistened with half-strength MS macro salts. The hardened plants were transferred to polybags and kept in shade house for acclimatization. Subsequently field trials were carried out at villages Manai (Jodhpur) and Kachholi (Sirohi) of Rajasthan. In the present paper establishment of micropropagated plants, cultivation, growth and net profit from biomass produced has been reported for environmental conditions of Rajasthan. Total dry biomass harvested was 2800 kg/acre/ for first year and 3000 kg/acre/for second year