Process Replacement with Tube Laser & Extruded Steel Profiles

Summary

  • Investigated the use of extruded steel profiles and automated tube laser technology to replace traditional sheet metal bending process to:

    • Increase throughput by 10x

    • Reduce average part cost by 44%

  • Redesigned a best-selling product:

    • Replaced 19 unique sheet metal part designs into 3 common steel profiles

    • Increased product automation compatibility from 69% to 99%

Mission & Background

During my graduate thesis project, I worked with a sheet metal manufacturer to develop an automated alternative to manually bent sheet metal parts using standardized steel profiles and advanced tube laser technology to increase automation, reduce costs, and improve manufacturing efficiency.

The manufacturer currently uses two machines to fabricate bent sheet metal parts: the press brake and the panel bender. The project aims to propose the acquisition of a tube laser, which has the highest level of automation, throughput, and the lowest cost per part.

The manufacturer produces many long and slender bent sheet metal parts called channel parts. Channel parts require manual labor for bending with press brakes, as most of them are incompatible with the automated panel bender. The alternative process enabled by steel profiles and automated tube laser machines is hypothesized to reduce labor time, increase throughput, and lower cost.

After analyzing the shop’s sheet metal production data, it is found that the alternative process could replace a maximum of 12.3% of total North American sheet metal production, which represents hundreds of thousands of parts per year.

My Role

While my teammate focused on building the cost model that justified the payback of implementing this new process, I focused on proposing 3 extruded steel profiles to maximize the replacement of as many sheet metal parts as possible in one representative product.

It is worth noting that with the capability of the tube laser, the shop could create a variaty of new profiles, such as C channels or L channels.

Below are a selection of the redesign proposal.

Result

After preliminary structural analysis, the proposed redesign is acceptable. This means that the 19 unique sheet metal part designs that are currently manually bent could be produced on the automated tube laser. The redesign increases automation compatibility from 69% to 99%, and can generate potential cost savings of 49% to 79%.

Huge thanks to my teammate Omar Talal, thesis advisor Professor Dave Hardt, program director Jose Pacheco, and my colleagues in the host organization.