Research & Development  Unit in Mechanical and Industrial Engineering

Funder

Organizational Unit

Publications

A new concept of automated manufacturing process for wire rope terminals

Publication . Figueiredo, D.; Silva, Francisco J. G; Campilho, R.D.S.G.; Silva, André; Pimentel, C.; Matias, J.C.O.

The products related to automotive industry need to be extremely competitive. The metallic wire ropes used to open doors in the vehicles are based on a braided wire rope provided with accessories. The more expensive is the vehicle, the more complex is the required final wire rope. In order to prevent the corrosion and reduce noise, the internal metallic cable can be coated with a polymer via extrusion. However, this coating needs to be removed from the extremities of the metallic cable, allowing the zamak injection of the mechanical terminals, preventing die casting defects. Nevertheless, the standard machines able to produce the mechanical terminals by die casting process were always prepared to work only with non-coated metallic cable. Customers demanding coated metallic cables impose the need to adapt the standard machines to this new reality. Thus, new systems needed to be added to the standard machine, allowing the metallic cable strip operation. Moreover, this operation needs to be added to the process but without repercussions on the cycle time. Different approaches were studied and tested in order to find the best solution. The new device was designed and produced, allowing its test in real conditions. The system based on just one blade did not show satisfactory results, being necessary the use of a system based on multiple blades. The new device, when connected to the standard machine, allows to produce wire ropes up to 2.5 meters long, striped in both sides, letting the die casting injection of the zamak terminal in one extremity, with a cycle time of 7 seconds (1000 wire ropes per hour, as they are produced in couples).

2020Journal article

Open access

Improving Preventive Maintenance Management in an Energy Solutions Company

Publication . Martins, L.; Silva, Francisco J. G; Pimentel, C.; Casais, Rafaela B.; Campilho, R.D.S.G.

In industry, production processes and assets are constantly evolving, Thus, continually improving and updating them is essential to their sustainability. This work intended to apply a set of methods and philosophies to improve the Preventive Maintenance Management process in a case study company dedicated to the development, production and maintenance of power and distribution transformers. Thus, a Action – Research methodology was used. After identifying the main problems, a mixed maintenance strategy based on Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) and Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) was applied. The following achievements were obtained by this work: (a) method of grading equipment critically based on its importance to the production process was developed and implemented;(b) a new flowchart of decisions and actions was developed for Preventive Maintenance Plan Management; (c) a reduction of the waste time in Preventive Maintenance (PM) was obtained; (d) the implementation of Autonomous Maintenance (AM) resulted in a reduction of 66% in equipment failures; (e) a set of new Key Performance Indicators (KPI´s) were introduced; (f) maintenance plans compliance rates increased by 12%. At the end of the work a reduction of € 120 060 could be achieved. Thus, the main contribution of this work was to show that bringing to the action different tool together in an organized way and share the information and responsibilities with the workers can result in important savings to the company, becoming the maintenance function more effective.

2020Journal article

Open access

Development of a suitable project management approach for projects with parallel planning and execution

Publication . Freitas, F.; Silva, Francisco J. G; Campilho, R.D.S.G.; Pimentel, C.; Godina, R.

In a big company, project management (PM) is always present. Traditional predictive PM approach is concerned with planning everything in advance and then controlling and adjusting if necessary, throughout the project timeline. This may work well when the requirements are well established, but for maintenance projects brings inherent uncertainty. When the subject is aircraft maintenance, it is almost impossible to plan everything at the beginning and expect that it will occur as planned because however a scheduled maintenance plan exists, according to statistics 60% of the aircraft total failure can only be found with ground inspection which means, that even if a plan is established before receiving the aircraft, it will most certainly need to be significantly changed. This requires a big effort from the planning team to plan everything right and ensure that all tools and resources are available to perform the required tasks. To solve this issue, in this paper we propose a hybrid project management approach developed to a case study company from the aircraft repair sector, to enable a faster planning while taking into account the priorities and dependencies of the inherent project tasks with the available resources.

2020Conference object

Open access