Integration Of Polymer Processing And Advanced Quality Assurance Courses An Injection Molding Project Using Design Of Experiments

Abstract

Kettering University is a coop college for Engineering and Managerial Studies located in Flint, Michigan. Our students alternate terms of classroom/laboratory work with terms of work experience with their corporate sponsors. Because of this unique education system, it is important that our students are able to apply their classroom/laboratory experience to solve the problems they encounter during their work terms. Since the Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering Department has a polymer processing laboratory, which provides the students with hands-on manufacturing experience in injection molding, extrusion, and material characterization, it is a reasonable place to create near "real world" projects for class integration in problem solving. The Advance Quality Assurance (AQA) course offered by the IE program is a process quality improvement course which covers Design of Experiments (DOE), Response Surface Methodology (RSM), and Quality Control Charts. The Polymer Processing course taught by the ME faculty studies how polymeric materials are affected by processing parameters. One of the major topics in the course is the study of injection molding, its optimization, and trouble shooting. This pilot project to integrate the two courses is a consequence of the demand from industry. As a result of the integration, IE students will acquire knowledge of the injection molding process and ME students will learn DOE techniques. The step-by-step DOE technique was applied to an injection molded tensile bar, which demonstrated what to be studied in the experiment, how to conduct the experiment, how to collect and analyze data, and how to draw practical conclusions on the basis of the data. This paper will show the roadmap and discuss the process and the outcome of the integration of AQA, an industrial engineering course and Polymer Processing, a manufacturing course.