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On SUR/FIN 2009, Dr. Alan Rose of Elsyca Inc. will present a technical paper about “Maximising decorative electroplating productivity by optimizing the rack design for a family of ten different door handles”, a joined case with Ingersoll Rand Security Technologies and Finishing Technologies.
Costs are designed into products. Choices made on the design, the materials and indeed the manufacturing processes employed have a profound impact on the final product cost.
There is a growing view, that with the availability and improvement of computer aided engineering tools (CAE), electroplating should be considered as more of a science rather than an art. The chemistry and physics are known and just as computing tools are regularly used for thermal, stress and fluids analysis in product and process development, they can also be used in optimizing racking and tooling design for plating processes. Plating thickness distribution can be predicted on a component or rack of components of any complexity.
This paper describes how such a software tool was used to effectively deliver a virtual plating plant with the goal to assess the impact of manufacturing process decisions. In order to minimize operator costs and error a starting premise was that a range of 10 different door handle designs could be plated on a single rack design. For such a wide variation of designs from small to large, sharp-edge to smooth and curvey, arriving at a single optimized rack design was quite a challenge. A trial and error approach of building and testing racks for all 10 different handle designs and a range of different decorative surface finishing options (e.g. satin nickel, bright chrome, antique brass) would be inconceivable as it would be far too wasteful, incurring large cost and time penalties. For such a wide range of part designs and surface finishing options, Computer Aided Engineering is definitely the answer to maximize productivity.
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