Oops

In the future I will avoid creating novel-portioned posts and just keep it to reader's digest.

Work Project #1 - Failure analysis of a new product

After finishing my freshman year of school at Iowa State, I came home for the summer of 2006 to find my services at the local Circuit City were no longer needed. Instead of settling for the first minimum wage job I could find, I found a job through an employment agency. They matched me with Joule Technologies, a small company which specializes in test solutions for printed circuit boards and other electronics. As it turned out, my low-level temp position at the company turned into a much greater employment opportunity down the road, and before that summer had ended, it was agreed that I would return as a full-on mechanical engineering intern.

Internship duties during the summer of 2007 included a lot of machining of piece parts, I became very proficient on mills, lathes, and operating 2D CNC rout/drill machines. Essentially, I was aiding the engineers in the fabrication and assembly of their test fixtures (side note: the test fixture industry has an extremely short time window from P.O. to delivery of the product, sometimes less than a week).

A final and important duty for me was to design a means and procedure to find the expected cycle life of a custom handle that they created in-house for their test fixtures. Up to this point, they had been ordering another company's handles for every job, at a significant markup in price and ultimately subpar quality. The goal was to improve product quality and value for the customers while reducing cost to Joule Tech.

The physical solution I came to was a PLC controlled robot which would pneumatically actuate the handle, open the fixture lid, close the lid, then release the handle. I designed and fabricated the "robot" using autocad, our 2D CNC machine for delrin components, and a mill for aluminum components. Ultimately, the fixture was cycled a million times and it was determined that the internal mechanisms of the handle would statistically be expected to begin to wear after about 50,000 actuations, far too soon for the product's intended lifetime. As an aid to the statistical analysis (which was done well before my machine design class, for the record), the wear was documented with a 50x magnification microscope/camera using both aluminum and steel internal components in two different trials.

The testing done was helpful to the company, since they had shipped several fixtures to customers without doing any failure analysis on the product. They knew which type of internal components to provide to customers who already had the product in case of premature failure, and they knew what improvements needed to be made to the design before selling any more.