Modern Mechanical Engineering

Sustainable development is very much essential in the contemporary scenario due to increasing environmental concerns, demand for energy, global warming and end of life safe disposal of products. Engineering Professionals possess a vital role to enable sustainable development. This situation necessitated the engineers to understand the challenges and opportunities associated with sustainable development. This chapter highlights the need for including sustainability concepts in modern mechanical engineering curriculum. This chapter provides the details about sustainability, three pillars and orientations of sustainability, fundamental concepts and tools/techniques of sustainability. The insights on challenges and recent advancements in sustainability are also presented with the curriculum contents of sustainability in mechanical engineering education.

This chapter presents the analysis of a solar distillation system with phase change material storage system. There is always a scarcity of clean and pure drinking water in many developing countries. Water from various sources is often brackish (i.e. contain dissolved salts) and/or contains harmful bacteria and therefore, cannot be used for drinking purpose. In addition, there are many coastal areas where seawater is abundant but potable water is not available in sufficient quantity. Apart from drinking purpose, pure water is also useful for health and industrial purposes such as hospitals, schools and batteries etc. Many parts of India, particularly, rural areas, coastal areas and many urban areas too, have a major drinking water problem. Sufficient drinking water, at accepted purity level, is just not available.

Increasingly, Magneto-rheological (MR) fluid technology has been successfully employed in various applications across various fields. This technology has received significant attention due to its adaptability in the operation of semi-active control systems requiring small power sources. It can potentially deliver highly reliable mechanical operations, managed by a magnetic field as the external operating power. To summarize current magneto-rheological technology, MR fluid can be described as a controllable material that is included in the group of smart materials that have the unique ability to change yield stress. This property can be used in MR devices to generate and control force. The aim of this chapter is to review recent research into MR fluid technology by describing the important factors affecting MR devices design, such as MR fluid properties, operational modes, magnetic materials, and magnetic circuits.

Exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) is being used widely to reduce and control the NO_x emissions from internal combustion engines. However, the use of EGR leads to rise in soot emission and contamination of lubricating oil. Soot-contaminated lubricating oil has been shown to accelerate engine wear. At the same time, zinc dialkyldithiophosphate (ZDDP) which is widely used in lubricating oil as highly active extreme pressure and anti-wear additive may harmfully affect the internal combustion engine and its exhaust gas purifying installation. It is an important for the engine lubricating oil to look for new type lubricating oil additives without or low phosphorus. Rare-earth is the general name of 17 elements, including scandium, yttrium and lanthanide series. It is potential for the rare-earth compounds as new type and efficient lubricating oil additives because most of rare-earth compounds have hexagonal crystal layer structure. Current research results showed that the application prospects of some rare-earth compounds in the tribology field were extremely vast, such as oil, grease, water and coating lubrication systems etc. This chapter will mainly focus on the recent developments on the tribological behaviour of lubricating oils containing rare-earth elements, including the preparation and lubricating mechanism of rare-earth nanoparticles, surface modification for the rare-earth inorganic compound, rare-earth additives with potential application, synergistic effect of the rare-earth compounds and other additives, and the research tendency on the rare-earth lubricating additives, especially the influence of rare-earth elements on the tribological performance of carbon films and its friction-reduced catalyst function etc. which will be helpful to understand and develop the lubrication role of the rare-earth elements as additives in the lubricating oils.

Viscoelastic damping treatments are an interesting solution for the vibration control of light and large structures. Despite the simplicity of the damping mechanism that characterizes this vibration control system, the design of these treatments is complex and requires some specific strategies to handle properly the description of the material behavior, to represent accurately the kinematics of all the layers of the damped structure and to apply optimization procedures to improve the damping efficiency. This Chapter presents a review on viscoelastic damping treatments, and those important issues related to the material characterization, numerical modeling and optimization are thoroughly analyzed and explored.

This chapter presents the thermodynamic foundations for the analysis of multiphase steels and some conventional approaches used in the analysis of these materials, including classical constitutive equations. Afterwards, the standard strategies for modeling multiphase metals are introduced as well as some examples. The new assumptions and today’s modeling strategies, that include complex numerical simulation methods such as the finite element method, finite volume, finite differences and phase-field methods, are also presented and compared with the previous approaches, with the aid of examples and research results.

Today manufacturing is highly decentralized from the company headquarters to local Production sites, taking advantages from local resources such as labor costs, raw materials, infrastructures, etc. Economic scale factors motivate the implementation of large scale plants. These huge plants imply great number of distributed production lines. The decentralized environment increases the need for complex management tools that enable the complete on-line system supervision and control. This chapter presents an optimal real-time management system for automatic production plants, that incorporates low-level communications between processes—PLCs (Programmable Logic Controllers), a centralized optimization and supervisory tool that manages the entire system and remote communication between system’s administrator and production processes (internet, GSM mobile communications, …). This concept is a two layer management architecture where inner loops are performed by PLC networks and the outer optimization loop is performed by a SCADA system (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition), combined with complex mathematical tools that enable the system to run real-time complex computational algorithms to optimize the hourly target production.

This chapter reviews the most commonly used techniques used for modeling and optimizing mechanical systems and processes. Statistical and artificial intelligence based tools for modeling are summarized, pointing their advantages and shortcomings. Also, analytic, numeric and stochastic optimization techniques are briefly explained. Finally, two cases of study are developed in order to illustrate the use of these tools, the first one dealing with the modeling of the surface roughness in a drilling process and the other one, on the multi-objective optimization of a hot forging process.

This chapter contains a summary of the current state of the ISO data model ISO14649 for Numerical Controller also known as STEP-NC. It details the reasons and need for an industrial STEP-NC paradigm shift by showing the benefits that would be immediately realizable using currently available tools and knowledge. Specific focus is given to the SPAIM application as it is one of the most advanced STEP-NC enabling applications available today that allows realizing those benefits. In considering the future possibilities of STEP-NC and the need for continued implementation, four important and complex topics are addressed. These topics would enable an increase in: interoperability through hybrid manufacturing environments, manufacturing supervision and traceability, flexibility and efficiency with high knowledge and information transfer as well as production optimization and simulation in multi-process manufacturing. Finally, a brief synopsis of the systems and components necessary for machine migration to STEP-NC using the SPAIM enabling application is given.

Sculptured surface machining (SSM) is an operation widely applied to several industrial fields such as aerospace, automotive and mold/die. The number of the parameters and strategies involved to program such machining operations can be enormously large owing to surface complexity and advanced design features. To properly reduce the number of parameters, design of experiments (DOE) methodology along with statistical analysis can be adopted. In this paper DOE and respective analysis were used to conduct machining experiments with the use of a computer aided manufacturing (CAM) software. Major goal is to investigate which of process parameters are worthy of optimization through intelligent systems. Two scenarios were considered to machine a sculptured part; one involving 3-axis roughing/3-axis finish machining experiments and one involving 3-axis roughing/5-axis finish machining experiments. Roughing operation was common for both scenarios. The problem was subjected to discrete technological constraints to reflect the actual industrial status. For each machining phase, two quality objectives reflecting productivity and part quality were determined. Roughing experiments were conducted to minimize machining time (t _mr ) and remaining volume (v _r ); whilst finishing experiments were targeted to minimize machining time (t _mf ) and surface deviation (s _dev ) between the designed and the machined 3D model. Quality characteristics were properly weighted to formulate a single objective criterion for both machining phases. Results indicated that DOE applied to CAM software, enables numerical control (NC) programmers to have a clear understanding about the influence of process parameters for sculptured surface machining operations generating thus efficient tool paths to improve productivity, part quality and process efficiency. Practically the work contributes to machining improvement through the proposition of machining experimentation methods using safe and useful platforms such as CAM systems; the application of techniques to avoid problem oversimplification mainly when large number of machining parameters should be exploited and the evaluation of quality criteria which allow their assessment directly from CAM software.

Micromachining emerges as a key technology for the future of manufacturing due to its many applications in miniaturization but also for macro scale components with features in the micro world, e.g. microgrooves or microholes. However, phenomena in the microscopic level are quite different from the ones encountered in traditional machining and thus the analysis of micromachining raises difficulties. Since the use of experiments is costly, difficult to perform and it is hard to measure parameters at this level, modeling is considered the best alternative for performing the required analysis. In this chapter a review of the modeling methods used in micromachining is provided. Most of the chapter is dedicated to mechanical micromachining and its modeling and simulation via finite elements; this is because this kind of micromachining exhibits the most differences in the microworld with size effect and minimum chip thickness being topics of great interest and because this method has proven to be the favorite for many research groups worldwide. The chapter closes with a brief discussion on other modeling methods and micromachining processes and a wide reference list for all the topics is included.

Micro products and components are demanded for industrial applications including electronics, optics, aerospace, medicine, biotechnology etc. in recent years. Laser machining, focused ion beam machining, electrochemical machining, electrodischarge machining and micro mechanical machining have been used to manufacture such components. However, the capability of micro mechanical machining especially micro milling to manufacture a wide range of workpiece materials and complex three-dimensional geometries makes it one of the best candidates to produce the micro parts. Therefore, this chapter provides a review of the current developments in the field of micro milling. Since the mechanism of material removal in micro milling is different from macro milling due to the presence of minimum chip thickness, size effect, elastic recovery and ploughing mechanism, these effects must be taken into consideration in micro milling research. In this chapter, important aspects of the micro milling mechanisms such as minimum chip thickness, size effect, effects of workpiece materials microstructure and cutting edge radius are presented. Furthermore, micro cutting tools are tiny and fragile and can be easily broken due to the excessive deflections, forces and vibrations. Therefore, an appropriate cutting tool geometry and cutting conditions must be selected in micro milling. To this end, the development of micro tool research and applications in micro milling are also presented.

This chapter speaks about the application of digital image processing in conventional machining. Advantages and disadvantages of digital image processing techniques over the other sensors used in machining for product quality improvement is also discussed here. A short introduction to image processing techniques used in machining is presented here. A detailed review of image processing applications in machining for over the past decade is discussed in this chapter. Also, an example of an image texture analysis method utilized for cutting tool condition detection through machined surface images is presented. An overall conclusion leading to future work required in this field has been mentioned.

This chapter provides the theoretical and experimental background to the utilization of circle grid analysis in conjunction with formability and simulative laboratory tests at undergraduate and graduate courses of metal forming with the objective of exposing students to machine-tools, tool systems and practical problems that are commonly found in daily production of sheet metal parts. The presentation starts with a description of strain measures and measurements techniques, extends this background to plastic instability and fracture, introduces the forming limit diagrams and systematizes the associated formability tests, and reviews the process simulation tests aimed at characterizing bendability, stretchability and drawability of blanks. Then, presentation proceed with a comprehensive description of a flexible, versatile and robust laboratory tool system that was developed by the authors to support education and basic research activities of sheet metal forming. The last part of the chapter presents the fundamentals of a simple finite element computer program developed by the authors that gives support to sheet metal forming laboratory tests and provides students with a strong link between experimentation and numerical simulation.

In this study, the impact of employing multimedia resources in the teaching of a common first year engineering course, Engineering Materials, was investigated. The aim was to determine if there was an improvement in students’ reported understanding and evidence of increased student engagement in the online discussion forums as a result of using the resources. Threshold concepts and the related notion of troublesome knowledge has resurfaced in research as well as in current thinking about learning and teaching in higher education. There is no clear indication in engineering education literature on how multimedia resources could influence student understanding of threshold and complex concepts. The multimedia resources used in the course were developed as part of a framework of resources intended to guide students through identified threshold concepts. Animation software was used, supplemented by video recordings and inked annotations of each lecture. An online survey was conducted over three semesters utilizing an inbuilt facility in the online learning environment. The initial results showed that implementing the multimedia resources significantly improved the student engagement in the online discussion forums? The perceived quality of teaching and students’ understanding of complex topics also improved as was revealed by results and students report. Seventy three per cent of the students stated their preference toward teaching methods using multimedia resources and inking. This preference was more pronounced in the off campus or online student cohort.