Manufacturing: Introduction

Overview

The word manufacturing is derived from the Latin manu factus, meaning made by hand. Manufacturing involves making products from raw materials by various processes or operations.

Manufacturing is generally a complex activity, involving people who have a broad range of disciplines and skills and a wide variety of machinery, equipment, and tooling with various levels of automation, including computers, robots, and material-handling equipment. Manufacturing activities must be responsive to several demands and trends:

• A product must fully meet design requirements and specifications.

• A product must be manufactured by the most economical methods in order to minimize costs.

• Quality must be built into the product at each stage, from design to assembly, rather than relying on quality testing after the product is made.

• In a highly competitive environment, production methods must be sufficiently flexible so as to respond to changing market demands, types of products, production rates, production quantities, and on-time delivery to the customer.

• New developments in materials, production methods, and computer integration of both technological and managerial activities in a manufacturing organization must constantly be evaluated with a view to their timely and economic implementation.

• Manufacturing activities must be viewed as a large system, each part of which is interrelated to others. Such systems can be modelled in order to study the effect of factors such as changes in market demands, product design, material and various other costs, and production methods on product quality and cost.

• The manufacturing organization must constantly strive for higher productivity, defined as the optimum use of all its resources: materials, machines, energy, capital, labour and technology. Output per employee per hour in all phases must be maximized.

Many processes are used to produce parts and shapes. There is usually more than one method of manufacturing a part from a given material. The broad categories of processing methods for materials are:

 

Metal Casting	Expendable mold and permanent mold .
Metal Forming & shaping	Rolling, forging, extrusion, drawing, sheet forming, powder metallurgy, and molding .
Plastics Molding & Forming	Blow Molding, CNC Machining, Centrifugal Casting, Continuous Strip Molding, Compression Molding, Profile Extrusion, Continuous Lamination, Injection Molding, Filament Winding, Thermoforming,Vacuum Forming, Pressure Bag Molding, Pressure Forming, Pulshaping, Twin Sheet Forming, Pultrusion, Liquid Resin Molding, Reaction Injection Molding (RIM), Rotational Molding, Resin transfer molding (RTM)
Rapid Prototyping	Stereolithography - SLA or SL, 3D Printing - 3DP, Selective Laser Sintering - SLS, Fused-Deposition Modeling - FDM, Solid-Ground Curing - SGC, Laminated Object Manufacturing - LOM, Multi-Jet Modeling - MJM, Direct Shell Production Casting - DSPC, Polyjet Technology, Laser Engineered Net Shaping - LENS
Joining	Welding, brazing, soldering, diffusion bonding, adhesive bonding, and mechanical joining .
Machining	Turning, boring, drilling, milling, planing, shaping, broaching, grinding, ultrasonic machining, chemical, electrical, and electrochemical machining and high-energy beam machining .
Finishing Operations	Honing, lapping, polishing, burnishing, deburring, surface treating, coating and plating processes.