Factory and Material Flow Design for Mass Production of an Advanced Process Control Educational Device

Abstract

A desktop Fiber Extrusion Device (FrED) was primarily developed for learning smart manufacturing and feedback control systems. As an educational kit, FrED was designed to be compact, safe, and low-cost while also providing feature-rich data. However, the current cost of FrED was still too high, and thus required further design and development to reduce the cost and make it affordable for individual learners. One part of FrED development was to build a FrED factory for mass production in order to provide the physical kits for both offline and online classes. This thesis proposed a factory design based on collected user needs, which included office and production area to effectively support mass production. Material flow and production line was designed and modeled by understanding and performing time studies on all manufacturing processes and logistics required for each component. Scheduling of the part fabrication process was also conducted to minimize the overall production time. With the production line modeling proposed, the production time for one FrED and five FrED was expected to be 1 day 5 minutes and 1 day 163.75 minutes, respectively. This primary study on FrED production can be used to estimate the production required for a larger batch production, and further improve manufacturing processes to reduce the production time required thus resulting in a higher throughput rate of mass production in the future.