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In the modern manufacturing environment, Cellular Manufacturing Systems (CMS) have gained greater importance in job shop or batch-type production to gain economic advantage similar to those of mass production. Successful implementation of CMS highly depends on the determination of part families; machine cells and minimizing inter cellular movement. This study considers machine component grouping problems namely intercellular movement and cell load variation by developing a mathematical model and optimizing the solution using Genetic Algorithm to arrive at a cell formation to minimize the inter-cellular movement and cell load variation. The results are presented with a numerical example.

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The automotive chassis is the main load carrier and energy absorbing component in all crash events namely, frontal impacts, rear impacts, side impacts and roll over. It is important to have a strong and light weight material for the chassis. The purpose of this paper is to observe how a backbone chassis behaves during collision. This work involves static, dynamic and modal analysis of a backbone chassis of Lotus Europa, a compact sports car. Deformation, stress and strain distribution are evaluated and factor of safety is calculated using static structural analysis. In modal analysis mode shapes for different natural frequencies of the system are presented. Further, impact analysis performed using explicit dynamic analysis compares the deformation and stress distribution for front, rear and side impact for different impact velocities. Two materials namely mild steel and aluminium are compared for impact analysis.

Vibrations in a mechanical system can cause power losses or vibrational fatigue which leads to failure in the material. In the current scenario automotive vehicles majorly use passive vibrational control techniques for vibration attenuation. Passive vibrational control tend to be heavy in nature and can only control frequencies in the range of 100 – 200 Hz. Conversely, active vibrational control is the potential alternative to passive vibrational control, they consist of strain sensor, piezoelectric actuator, a control system and a power amplifier to draw the control actuator. The application of active vibrational control is flourishing due to the demand in critical vibrational control in extreme conditions (underwater, polar, space). This paper provides an overview of the applications of active vibration control on single stage spur gear. The vibrations emitted in a single stage spur gear is optimised by active vibration control.