Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Systems

The long use of a system causes its degradation. Hence, the maintenance activity is required in order to keep and improve the efficiency in the system. With the rapid development in networking technology, a need appears to change the manufacturing strategies. These new technologies improve the maintenance process, and establish remote maintenance (tele-maintenance, e-maintenance and m-maintenance). These kinds of maintenance try to provide personnel maintenance with the right information at the suitable time, which makes information available, anywhere and anytime. Our proposition is the use of mobile agent technology to reduce the maintenance costs and solve the problem of the unavailability of an expert in all phases of condition-based maintenance (CBM) strategy. The mobile agent technology overcomes a lot of problems and there is not much work that has used this technology. We have also used the web services (WS) to insure interoperability between machines and to support interaction over the network. Our approach gives great support to the maintenance engineer as it facilitates the access to decision-making support, work order, etc. which are available in the device like smartphone. This paper presents the development of a mobile maintenance support system based on mobile agent technology. The proposed system, the web and agent technology as well as remote communication were tested successfully.

The energy distribution in the electric discharge machining process influences the material removal rate, relative wear ratio and the surface roughness of the machined surface and the effective energy is the part of energy which is distributed toward workpiece to be machined. The theoretical modeling of the process is based upon the heat transfer equations and one of the important parameter is fraction of energy transferred to the workpiece. The model first calculates the temperature distribution in the workpiece material using ANSYS Finite element coding and then volume removed due to single spark is estimated from the temperature profiles. Theoretical material removal rate at different input parameters are compared with the experimental results, making it possible to determine the portion of energy that enters AISI H13 tool steel workpiece. The effect of input parameters (discharge current, voltage, pulse on time) on temperature distributions along the radius and depth of the workpiece has been reported.

A synthetic jet actuator (SJA) is one of the most widely used active flow control device which uses a vibrating diaphragm enclosed within a cavity to generate the fluid jet. The effectiveness of the actuator greatly depends upon the design of cavity and orifice and the diaphragm properties. A lot of emphasis is being laid on the cavity and orifice design, but very few literatures can be found dealing with the diaphragm of the SJA. Thus, in this paper a study of the SJA diaphragm actuated by piezoelectric ceramics of different geometries is being presented. Three different diaphragm materials — brass, poly-silicon and aluminum and five different geometries of the piezoelectric actuators — annular disc shaped actuator patch, annular shaped actuator, rectangular shaped actuator patch and circular disc shaped actuator patch and two cantilever arrangements are being considered. A static analysis is carried out and a comparison of the parameters which affect the performance of the SJA is done. Frequency response analysis is also carried out to obtain a better understanding of the diaphragm's structural characteristics. The results thus obtained show that an annular disc piezoelectric patch configuration shows the best behavior as compared to the other actuator configurations and is closely followed by circular disc piezoelectric patch configuration.

As the population of the world is continuously increasing, demand of the mechanical manufactured products is also increasing. Machining is the most important process in any mechanical manufacturing, and in machining two factors, i.e. material removal rate (MRR) and surface roughness (SR) are the most important responses. If the MRR is high, the product will get desired shape in minimum time so the production rate will be high, but we could not scarify with the surface finishing also because in close tolerance limit parts like in automobile industry, if the surface is rough exact fit cannot take place.

The term optimization is intensively related to the field of quality engineering. Abrasive water jet machining is an important unconventional machining, in order to obtain better response, i.e. material removal rate and surface roughness. Various process parameters of AWJM need to be observed and selected to improve machining characteristics. Better machining characteristics can be achieved by optimizing various process parameters of AWJM.

This study considers four process control parameters such as transverse speed, standoff distance, abrasive flow rate and water pressure. The response is taken to be material removal rate and surface roughness. The work piece for stainless steel AISI 304 material of size 15 cm × 10 cm × 2 cm is selected for experiments. Sixteen experimental runs (two trials for each experimental runs) were carried out for calculating MRR and SR and average value of these two trials have been taken for analysis. MRR is normalized according to higher-is-better and SR is normalized according to lower is better. The experiment data analysis is done and VIKOR index is found. Finally, the analysis of VIKOR index using S/N ratio is done and found the most significant factor for AWJM and predicted optimal parameters setting for higher material removal rate and lower surface roughness. Verification of the improvement in quality characteristics has been made through confirmation test with the predicted optimal parameters setting. It is found that the determined optimum combination of AWJM parameters gives the lowest VIKOR INDEX which shows the successful implementation of VIKOR Method coupled with S/N ratio in AWJM.