School of Applied Sciences (SAS) (2006-July 2014)

Permanent URI for this community

https://dspace.lib.cranfield.ac.uk/handle/1826/20

Browse

Browsing School of Applied Sciences (SAS) (2006-July 2014) by Course name "Innovative Manufacturing"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Development of a framework for assessing the economic benefit of remanufacturing
    (Cranfield University, 2009-09) Jakpa, Onome, E.; Xu, Yuchun
    Product waste is becoming a big problem in our life. In order to reduce waste and efficiently use resources, product can be remanufactured, and its materials can be recycled to achieve better sustainability. In comparison with recycling materials, remanufacturing products can retain all the value added, so potentially it has high profitability and sustainability. Despite its main advantage of retaining the value of the products, remanufacturing is an area that is not widely practiced due to the high costs of remanufacturing and reverse logistics facilities. As a result of this, the cost components had to be researched in order to ascertain the costs involved in the process of remanufacturing. The identification the cost drivers in each of the process provided the basis for a generic framework to be developed which gives remanufacturers a template to determine the economic benefits of remanufacturing from a whole systems point of view including the reverse logistics. Through the use of a specified methodology, this research aims to capture all the costs involved in the whole systems remanufacturing process given that the previous models that exist do not propose a costing model for both reverse logistics and remanufacturing. Ready to Use Additive Manufacturing – RUAM is a technique for creating robust three dimensional metal objects. It is application in the framework allows for the refabrication of EOL products.
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Enabling the development of a sustainability best practice library
    (Cranfield University, 2009-09) Nazir, Amir; Al-Ahsaab, Ahmed
    Global environmental problems, rising energy prices, lack of raw material availability, increasingly demanding legislation and costly environmental taxes are some of the reasons that drive company policy towards adopting sustainability concepts and practices. This MSc thesis project aimed to carry on the research of industrial sustainability best practices in order to have a detail documentation that will aid the development of digital library. This is to help companies like CEMEX and their stakeholders to increase their sustainability awareness and enabling them to embed best practices in their operational processes. The research lacked clear and coherent method for mapping best practices from the literature into the adopted sustainable development process without validation. Nevertheless recommendations included proposing a separate study for the implementation of the sustainable development process and a further pilot study into implementing a few key best practices within industry. Overall this study was successful in helping to identify and validate best practices that were most frequently mentioned by academics and to some extent reflected the existing state of affairs concerning sustainable development and the environment.
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Finite element analysis of laminated glass
    (Cranfield University, 2009-09) Watson, Chris; Walton, A.; Skordos, Alexandros A.
    In the road and rail industries, annealed float glass is combined with a thin polymeric layer to form a 3-ply glass/PVB/glass structure known as laminated glass. Amongst other characteristics, the PVB acts to retain fractured glass fragments, thus minimising injury from flying glass shards. Previous attempts at predicting the behaviour of laminated glass during impact have proven difficult due to complex stress fields caused by the large differences in moduli. The following research made an attempt at modelling laminated glass using the Laminated Glass model of LS-DYNA (MAT_32). Experimental results, used for model validation, displayed a large amount of scatter that may have been due to differences in manufacturing conditions. Numerical prediction results showed the model to be highly sensitive to mesh refinement. The resultant data showed poor correlation with experimental results predicting a much softer response.
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Semantic based approach for knowledge management
    (Cranfield University, 2009-09) Sanya, Isaac; Shehab, Essam; Roy, Rajkumar
    Companies are beginning to understand the importance of the management and maintenance of knowledge resources. One of the main constraints that have hindered the solution to resolving technical problems has been the efficient access to knowledge and expertise. Currently, the problem of ‘understanding’ has been one of the main limitations that have hindered the robustness of conventional systems due to lack of ‘semantics’ in knowledge representation. Therefore, there is need for enhancing the management and maintenance of knowledge through a semantic based approach. Semantics is defined as the study of meaning in communication and it aims to identify relationships between syntactical elements through the use of ontologies. The aim of this thesis is to develop prototype tools utilising semantic based approach for knowledge management in order to demonstrate and quantify the potential capability of these technologies within the defence equipment support market. The development of these semantic based prototypes are based upon accomplishing certain objectives: (i) transform an existing Excel based cost model into a semantic based application (ii) capture complex knowledge about maintenance and diagnosis of equipments in one central knowledge base, (iii) incorporate within the prototype a two way dialogue to help in diagnosing a problem and allow for rapid discovery of appropriate solutions, (iv) evaluate and validate use of semantic based approach to manage knowledge within the defence equipment support market, (v) use of multiple cases to demonstrate the benefits of semantic technology. The aim and objectives of this research project was achieved by adopting a qualitative research approach and a fivephase research programme methodology. The research project has highlighted that the use of semantic technology enhances the reusability, flexibility and maintainability of knowledge and its management. The ability to represent functionalities graphically reinforces understanding and makes functionality editing easier. Semantic technology can also be deployed gradually which means it can mature with the problem. The definition of synonyms and ontologies gives semantic technology an advantage over other computer based knowledge representation techniques. This research project successfully demonstrates and quantifies the benefits of semantic technology.