Date of Award

2018

Degree Type

Capstone Project

First Advisor

Bahram Nassersharif

Abstract

In this report, Team 16: The Extruders break down the design process of meeting their sponsor’s goals as a part of a capstone project. Team 16 was tasked with finding a solution to the problem put forth by Rogers, which was to reduce thickness variation of PTFE foam sheets produced by Rogers to within a 0.0003” tolerance. This will talk about how the team originally came up with potential solution for the problem, before transitioning into working on small scale testing equipment. While the ultimate goal of the project is to reduce the thickness variation of the sheets, no testing equipment was readily available to the team or Rogers short of shutting down production in order to run tests. In order to test potential solutions and gather relevant data on the problem testing equipment needed to be designed for Rogers’ Narragansett facility, the location the project was based out of. Solving this problem would expand Rogers’ market for its PTFE sheets to industries with high standards for quality such as the aerospace industry. This project proposes solutions and allows Rogers to test solutions that would allow them to eventually raise the quality of the PTFE sheets to these standards.

The following report documents the team’s initial design process, including research and concept generation, the process of choosing the most viable solutions, and the lengthy redesign process of the small scale testing equipment. The project resulted in a finished small scale version of the extruder used in the production process, as well as a testing plan that outlines the team’s proposed solutions. After significant redesigns and careful consideration of potential solutions the team developed an easily executable plan for testing the potential solutions and finished testing equipment that will allow Rogers to test the team’s design and to model their extrusion process easily for future testing. This plan and equipment can be used to find a solution which would make Rogers the only company in the world capable of producing PTFE at that quality.

Comments

Sponsor: Rogers Corporation

Download

Share

COinS