Implementation of Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems in the Manufacturing of Turbo Charger Turbine Housing

Today manufacturing industries have become more competitive and to survive, industries should be capable of accommodating the sudden market change. The conventional manufacturing systems like Dedicated Manufacturing Lines (DMLs) can produce high volume of product but difficult to cater to varying product types. On the other hand, Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS) is capable of handling product variety but not suited for mass production, The Reconfigurable Manufacturing System (RMS) gives the advantage of both the system, as it has the capability to adjust to both high volume requirement and product variety, and it able to upgrade to new process technology with minimal effort. In this work the reconfiguration is carried out in machine and system level. At machine level, a new inspection machine is proposed which can be used for multiple products with minimal adjustments and a special drilling and bore tool is suggested to reduce the cycle time and ramp up time when product changes. At system level a new layout is proposed which can handle multiple products effectively and which requires less space compared with the present layout, Discrete event simulation software Arena and Flexsim are used to simulate the proposed manufacturing system with stochastic nature. The simulation results of conventional and proposed systems are compared and presented.