Design and Manufacturing of the Extrusion Assembly for an Advanced Process Control Educational Device

Abstract

FrED (Fiber Extrusion Device) is a desktop fiber extrusion system that is developed to teach advanced process control in a heuristic manner. There was a need to work on reducing the cost of the existing version of FrED to make it accessible to remote learners. The device was broken down into various sub-assemblies and each sub-assembly was investigated in detail to identify opportunities for cost reduction. This thesis outlines the design and manufacturing of the extrusion assembly. The V-model methodology was adopted, and the functional requirements of the extrusion assembly were defined. Four iterations of prototyping were done. The prototypes were validated to see if they meet the functional requirements. User testing was conducted to check how user friendly the design is. A pilot run of 10 parts was done to check for potential design improvements. Lastly, the production level design was prepared along with a process plan. This was used to carry out the pilot production run of 15 FrEDs.