Date of Award

2018

Degree Type

Capstone Project

First Advisor

Bahram Nassersharif

Abstract

Team 17 was challenged with designing a solution for material handling of rolled goods within the Rogers Corporation facility, located in Narragansett RI. The material handler must give operators a safe, ergonomic method to load and unload rolls from paste extrusion. Then transfer the material to mobile storage or slitting operations while avoiding damage to the rolls and reducing handling times.

In accordance with the objectives of this project, the preliminary design followed by the build and testing detailed in this report provides an elegant, ergonomic, and safe method of transferring rolled material up to 250 lbs from production to various operations in the facility. The Roll Manipulator includes a vertical lift driven by a hand winch; it handles the material rolls by the inner core avoiding any damage to the rolled material. An accessory has been added to accommodate the simply supported machining operations. It is then trans- ported via a u-shaped base. To achieve a product that satisfies the design specifications, the team saw fit to research different methods of transporting material which are currently used. From this, the goal was to extract key characteristics from various devices to conceive a total of 92 concepts. Three of the most relevant concepts were selected and a Quality Function Deployment (QFD) analysis was performed. The QFD provided the team with valuable information regarding the relevance of the customer requirements and the engineering characteristics Upon completion of the Critical Design Review presentation, insightful comments and questions were posed to the team which furthered the advancement of the three designs being considered. With the help of this new information and the QFD analysis the three designs were narrowed down to one. The next step in the design process was to use this single design to compute engineering analysis on the tower, material handler, dynamic stability, weld points, and the accessory. The analysis aided in attaining the final geometry of each component while ensuring the absence of failure. A bill of material was then created and prices were evaluated to ensure the budget was not exceeded. Throughout the spring semester the team focused on building a prototype which met the design specifications of the project. At the start of the semester the components and stock materials were ordered. The build occurred shortly thereafter. The entire rolling prototype frame was built in house by the team. The device was tested via the test matrices included in this paper, to ensure product functionality. The prototype was completed prior to the Build and Test presentation and was displayed at the Capstone Design Showcase in April. As a result, this product can prove to be an invaluable tool to Rogers Corporation, who is striving to meet on time delivery at competitive prices.

Comments

Sponsor: Rogers Corporation

Download

Share

COinS