एडवांस इनोवेशन, थॉट्स एंड आइडियाज़ का इंटरनेशनल जर्नल

अमूर्त

Product Design and Analysis of Automotive Carrier

Lakshmi prasanna reddy polamreddy, S.C.Sireesha

There are different types of carriers present in the General Motors automotive plant which are intended to perform specific application (like one with assembly is used for handling various components for assembly, paint skid carrier is used for painting the BIW etc.). There are around 450 carriers on a whole in the entire plant and per hour it has to produce around 80 vehicles and total of 640 vehicles were produced in a shift. Break down of any one carrier will result into bottle neck formation in the assembly plant which will result into increased cost of production and subsequently causes loss to the organization. The cost of designing and manufacturing of single carrier is also high.
The main objective of this work is to develop a new carrier which can perform operations of two to three carriers together (for example, carrier which hold good for both fitting and painting BIW). This has been achieved by carefully studying the product development process and the system in the entire assembly plant. The carrier design in general is a complex methodology and to arrive at a solution which yields a good performance is a tedious task. Since the carriers have a complex geometry and loading patterns, there is no well-defined analytical procedure to analyse the carriers. So the numerical method of analysis is adopted, in which ‘Finite Element Technique’ is most widely used method. Based on FE simulation, modifications and optimization has been done on the entire carrier assembly which not only with stands the stress developed during the entire loading cycles but also passes with design safety factors. Prototype has been built based on FE results and it has been validated.