João Fernando Gomes de Oliveira

Sustainability in manufacturing: Recovery of resources in product and material cycles

Global Framework.- Life Cycle Engineering and Management.- Product Development.- Processes and Tools for Disassembly.- Planning for Remanufacturing and Recycling.- Enabling for Sustainability in Engineering.- Roadmap.

Development of Environmentally Friendly Fluid for CBN Grinding

Environmentally friendly water based fluids have been offered recently by many suppliers. On the other hand the G ratio values obtained for CBN grinding with water based coolants are much lower than with neat oil. This work presents a new water based grinding fluid formulation able to meet both the performance and environmental requirements for CBN grinding. The existence of a reaction between CBN grains and water is evaluated in grinding tests and also in a chemical reactor. The results show that the reaction between CBN grains and water is not significant when compared to the measured volumetric wheel wear in a grinding operation. Based on this fact, a new fluid concept consisting of a high concentration (up to 40%) of sulfonate vegetable oil in water is proposed and tested. In this way it was possible to combine high lubricity, better heat conductivity and good environmental properties in one fluid. The results show performance comparable to the obtained with neat oil.

DEVELOPMENT OF AN OPTICAL SCANNER TO STUDY WEAR ON THE WORKING SURFACE OF GRINDING WHEELS

ABSTRACT The efficiency of the grinding operation is highly dependent on the grinding wheel surface topography. Several methods for the evaluation of the grinding wheel surface have been developed in the last few years. In some of these methods, the grinding wheel has to be removed from the machine for an evaluation using a microscope or a profilometer. Some other methods are able to measure the topography at the grinding machine, but they do not give detailed information about grain distribution and wear. This paper shows a new method to map the grinding wheel surface. The proposed system is based on an optical scanner capable of measuring the light beam reflected from the wear flat areas on the abrasive grains over the whole wheel peripheral surface. The Mapping System for Grinding Wheels (MSGW) is able to acquire data with the wheel running at the work speed (30 m/s)and the measurement carried out on the grinding machine without stopping. The system is applied on a surface grinding operation where an A...

Evaluation of Two Competing Machining Processes Based on Sustainability Indicators

The industrial sector shows increasing interest in improving operational performance not only from the standpoints of quality and costs but also from that of sustainability. In this study, the performance of two competing machining processes – grinding and hard turning, which produce similar parts, was evaluated based on 49 sustainability indicators. Grinding was found to be the better technological option from the standpoint of economic advantage, while hard turning proved to be more advantageous in terms of sustainability.

Analysis of grinding strategies applied to crankshaft manufacturing

A critical step in the manufacture of forged crankshafts is the grinding of the sidewalls. The present research investigation was undertaken to evaluate strategies for high-speed CBN grinding of crankshafts sidewalls. Three strategies were analytically and experimentally compared: axial plunge grinding, axial face grinding, and multi-step axial face grinding. While all three strategies could produce acceptable parts, the multi-step face grinding strategy was found to be particularly advantageous for providing flexibility in the process control.

Design of a communication system for integration of industrial networks over public IP networks

The opportunity to integrate industrial automation applications from different cells over IP networks is a great advantage of such high level design over legacy proprietary data acquisition systems. The CyberOPC communication system is a research project in order to support and enhance all communications processes for manufacturing cells over Internet. That communication system was developed initially as variant of the OPC-XML data access specification with the aim to minimize the poll refresh time of the current OPC service communication system, simplify the Internet integration of low cost devices without the WebServices functionalities and provide CyberSecurity functionalities. We introduce in this work the CyberOPC communication system and propose the extension of the CyberOPC services with the device description services supported by an open and non-proprietary technology called Open-EDD with the goal to improve the integration and the process management of different shop floor distributed over public IP networks as Internet. The mains advantages of the proposed solution are: the performance of the CyberOPC Poll service; the simple integration with devices with the HTTP protocol support and the possibility to adopt the CyberOPC as transport system to manage remotely shop-floor services such as the device description service. The communication system proposed in this work represents an alternative technology for its performance and simplicity compared with the upcoming OPC-UA specification.

Towards a balanced scoreboard for assessing manufacturing processes sustainability

Industries can contribute for sustainable development by using cleaner and more efficient technologies. In view of that, to satisfactorily evaluate their processes performance, sustainability indicators turn out to be a crucial point. The present work has as its main objective providing a balanced scoreboard of performance aspects and indicators, whose priority lies in sustainability, and which are due to evaluate manufacturing processes. Although models for sustainability performance assessment have been presented over the last years, they still do not present a core group of indicators for manufacturing processes, which are accurate and easy to be measured.

Proposal of a Methodology Applied to the Analysis and Selection of Performance Indicators for Sustainability Evaluation Systems

Companies are interested in investigating the performance of their processes in terms of sustainability, since it is capable of providing a framework that integrates the environmental, social and economical interests into the business strategy. It is not possible nowadays to think about economical development without the parallel preservation of the environment and mutual benefit of the society. In this manner, companies are continually seeking to use wide-ranging input resources with better efficiency and more responsibility in their products and manufacturing technologies. In a highly competitive economical scenario, the most competitive companies are not the ones that use lower cost inputs anymore. As a result, more and more companies have been using performance measuring systems to identify and abandon resource intensive operations, pursuing efficient production models. Therefore, the main goal of this paper is to present a robust methodology proposal to be used in the assessment and selection of indicators for sustainability analyses of products and processes. Starting from a set of sustainability indicators obtained from different sustainability performance measurement systems, e.g. GRI, the methodology comes to make the construction of a special set of metrics suitable to specific purposes of investigation viable.

Investigation on Surface Finishing of Components Ground with Lapping Kinematics: Lapgrinding Process

Over the last three decades, researchers have responded to the demands of industry to manufacture mechanical components with geometrical tolerance, dimensional tolerance, and surface finishing in nanometer levels. The new lapgrinding process developed in Brazil utilizes lapping kinematics and a flat grinding wheel dressed with a single-point diamond dresser in agreement with overlap factor (Ud) theory. In the present work, the influences of different Ud values on dressing (Ud = 1, 3 e 5) and grain size of the grinding wheel made of silicon carbide (SiC = 800, 600 e 300 mesh) are analyzed on surface finishing of stainless steel AISI 420 flat workpieces submitted to the lapgrinding process. The best results, obtained after 10 minutes of machining, were: average surface roughness (Ra) 1.92 nm; 1.19 µm flatness deviation of 25.4 mm diameter workpieces and mirrored surface finishing. Given the surface quality achieved, the lapgrinding process can be included among the ultra-precision finishing processes and, depending on the application, the steps of lapping followed by polishing can be replaced by the proposed abrasive process.

Development of a dressing monitoring system through artificial intelligence and acoustic maps for high performance grinding

High performance grinding implies in reliable monitoring at high speeds. In this paper, the development of a dressing monitoring system based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) is discussed. Different from previous works that adopt AI to classify Acoustic Emission (AE) measurements in grinding operations, the proposed approach is less sensitive to noise. The results point out to increases in production velocity and quality. Simulated tests indicate to the high performance of the monitoring even in noise conditions.