The application of Design of Experiments as a support tool for a Drive Shaft retention system development.

In the automotive industry it is perceived a continuous time decreasing for new vehicles models launches, as an increasing of customer expectations that the new launches will not present problems due to lack of manufacturing process or due to projects not properly tested. Project or process adjustments during vehicle serial production are not acceptable anymore due to current market competition. In this way the Design of Experiments (DOE) came up to help the industry in set the optimum adjustments for products and process parameters, even in the beginning stages of product development. This paper presents an application of DOE as a support tool for the development of a Drive Shaft (DS) retention system. The steps of a generic model for industrial experimentation were followed in order to develop this case study. This generic model covers all the steps of planning and conducting of an experiment. As a result, a reliable product was obtained with optimised dimensional parameters for the quality characteristics and with suitable tolerances for the manufacturing process, added to a big decreasing on the product development time