Recently Completed Projects

Implementation of Innovative Hard Chromium Plating Tooling

Corpus Christi Army Depot (CCAD) operates one of the most modern, largest and busiest Defense Department (DoD) metal finishing facilities.  More than 15 different metal finishing processes are present at this facility.  Hard chromium plating is one of the most heavily used of these processes; CCAD chromium plates approximately 50 different aircraft parts with a total production load of approximately 4,500 parts per year.  The labor-intensive nature of hard chromium plating also makes it one of the most expensive processes to operate at CCAD; more than 25% of the metal finishing staff works on hard chromium plating.

During this CTMA Hard Chrome Phase I project, “no-mask” anodes for hard chromium plating two aircraft parts (horizontal pin and cover support from the CH-47) were developed and implemented.  These particular helicopter parts were selected because of their production frequency (make up 36% of hard chromium plating workload) and because they are difficult to plate (i.e. significant reject/rework rate).  The no-mask concept is relatively new to chromium plating.  It involves the design/fabrication of a rack and anode fixture, which are customized to particular parts.  The main advantages of this approach are reduced labor for masking, faster plating times and more uniform chromium deposits.

Overall, the project involved several stages of prototype design, fabrication and testing.  A final set of production tooling was then supplied and CCAD employee training was performed.  By the end of the project, the new tooling developed during the course of the work had been fully incorporated into the facility’s hard chromium plating operations, and continues to be in routine use. 

Hard chromium plating provides superior wear resistance for a wide variety of surface geometries.  Although there has been considerable effort over the past several years to develop alternative processes that can match its performance and flexibility, hard chromium plating is not likely to be superseded in the foreseeable future for many critical applications.  The results of this project will enable plating facilities to produce higher quality parts with substantially less time and effort than was possible with previous technology.

Key benefits derived from the project include:

•        Annual labor savings of $779,623

•        Reduction in shop turnaround time of 48.6 and 74.9% respectively for the horizontal pin (H-pin) and cover support

•        Increase in plating tank capacity of 24.1% (achieved as a result of reduced plating tank residence time for the H-pin and cover support).

Based on the success of prototype tooling tests, a second phase of work was recommended, approved and currently underway which focuses on some additional difficult to plate parts, including high nickel alloys and the development of generic tooling for critical parts that are less frequently plated.

Another project is also underway that extends the applicability of the tooling to the DoD facilities at North Island.

The NCMS contact is Paul Chalmer, 734-995-4911, paulc@ncms.org.

Smart Machine Pilot Project, Phase I

Industry has long held a vision of intelligent machinery and manufacturing process equipment that knows its own health, can predict impending failure, and can notify maintenance staff to fix the problem before it happens. Driven by rapid advances of the computer industry in the areas of network and mass storage technologies plus advances in industrial sensor technologies for factory control applications, mechanisms for gathering and storing the necessary data have existed for some time but what has lagged was technology for making sense of the data to produce useful information. The Smart Machines Pilot Project targets that last deficiency.

The Smart Machines vision is that a smart machine:

•             Knows its capabilities/condition and can be interviewed

•             Knows how to make the product in an optimal manner

•             Monitors, diagnoses, and optimizes itself

•             Knows the quality of its work

•             Learns and improves over time.

Both industry and government have worked together over the past two decades to move from purely reactive maintenance towards maintenance strategies that yielded both lower costs and higher factory productivity. Programmable logic controller (PLC)-based diagnostic systems installed on automotive industry transfer lines two decades ago provided much faster root cause diagnoses of outages minimizing production interruptions. Self-diagnostics in defense systems enabled fault isolation for field replacement of Line Replaceable Units (LRU). Over the past decade sensors specifically designed for diagnostics such as vibration analysis for rotating machinery have appeared. These and other evolutionary tech­nology developments plus low-cost computer, data storage, and high-speed network technology suitable for factory floor application have today brought the state-of-the-art to a point where Smart Machine benefits can begin to be realized.

Cincinnati Lamb, LLC developed a Field Reliability Evaluation Electronic Log (FREEDOM E-LOG) system to monitor equip­ment health and process effectiveness of its machine tool installations. It captures data automatically (without human intervention), stores it, processes it, and in some installations automatically sends data to Cincinnati Lamb for archival. It can be tailored to accommodate virtually any factory equipment and/or manufacturing process.

The project team piloted the technology in a variety of industrial and depot maintenance applications. As an example, a pilot installation at Red River Army Depot (RRAD) targeted the rubber compression molding line.  The system yielded benefits quickly. The RRAD installation within days revealed significant and unacceptable variation in operator controlled cycle times. Super­visory corrective actions reduced cycle time variation to acceptable limits, but a system failure stopped system operation and variation is believed to have crept back in. The series of events converted RRAD supervisors from skeptics to strong believers in automated process monitoring. They now enthusiastically support an expanded installation.  The team found that FREEDOM E-LOG could be applied and tailored to produce meaningful data from virtually any factory equipment and manufacturing process, no matter what type of machine control was present or even if no formal controls existed.