Techniques in design for manufacture and assembly

In essence the product introduction process requires the collaborative use of  

Early to market, larger market share, increased profit 

Later to market, smaller market share, reduced profits 

Business Sector Automotive Aerospace/ Defence Industrial Equipment All Sectors 

Similar savings have been reported by others involved with the application of techniques in design for manufacture and assembly (1.34). It is also worth commenting that the designs coming out of the process tend to be more reliable and easier to manufacture. 

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James et al. (1999) have estimated the fuel cell system cost as a function of membrane area, which can be converted to the cost as a function of output power. They used the Design for Manufacture and Assembly (DFMA) technique in their analysis and have shown that the estimated cost of the fuel cell stack can be represented by the following equation ... 

The final, and major constraint of the designer is that the cell and battery designs which evolve shall be amenable to mass production techniques at realistic costs. This is too extensive a topic to discuss here suffice it to say that each proposed material of construction and component design must be reviewed critically in the light of this criterion. The size of the operation can be gauged by considering a modest market for 60,000 urban delivery vans with a battery life of 3 years. The annual requirement would then be for 20,000 traction batteries containing, say, 15-20 million cells. If a production line assembled cells at the rate of two per minute and operated three shifts, all the year, it would still require 20 such production lines to manufacture this number of cells. The need for simplicity and automation is evident. 

The high temperatures and pressures used in early plants dictated specialized equipment which could be fabricated only by those who had experience in, and facilities for, munitions manufacture. This resulted in alloys and design often showing the common parentage with the munitions of the period between WW I and WW II. Since then, specific fabrication techniques have been developed which have made it possible to fabricate the larger size converters and interconnecting piping and the more easily assembled and disassembled facilities now required. 

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