Overcoming Quality Challenges: Establishing Adequate Requirements for Heat Treated Products - Tom Bell Young Author Award Candidate
Traditional metallurgical test methods do not meet AIAG/VDA Defect detection criteria for safety-critical components, and can represent significant overhead costs. Newer non-destructive methods are difficult to implement with substantial upfront costs, and must be integrated 100% inspection to impact PFMEA ratings, which can introduce a throughput constraint.
On the design side, it is generally impractical to physically test all combinations of product/process variation, or even test specification limits. Consequently, designs which met requirements in validation may experience degraded functionality in production due to ‘normal’ process variation that cannot be eliminated.
So what can be done?
Error detection must be used to trigger effective containment and evaluation, and Error proofing should leveraged whenever possible, but Virtual tools are more important than ever.
With the accelerated pace of innovation seen in automotive in the last decade, use of FEA simulation to evaluate part sensitivities is essential to identify and optimize design/process, reducing risk. Increased confidence must be achieved in test and data processing methodology through robust implementation which often requires substantial investment in time and data analysis, which can be enhanced through machine learning.