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Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Flexible Automation & Intelligent Manufacturing; FAIM 2014
No full textPaper presented at the Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Flexible Automation & Intelligent Manufacturing, held May 20-23, 2014 in San Antonio, Texas, and organized by the Center for Advanced Manufacturing and Lean Systems, University of Texas at San Antonio; Includes bibliographical references; Gas flaring continues to pose significant threat to the environment and economy of oil and gas producing countries in particular and the globe in general. This process impacts adversely to the health and safety of the inhabitant of these countries. About 100 Billion Cubic Meters (BCM) of gas is being flared globally on annual basis with Russia and Nigeria flaring more than other countries to the tune of 35.5 and 15.2 BCM, respectively. During oil and gas processing, excess gas that is generated could be managed and beneficially harnessed by systematic channelling of the gas to the power sector where turbines utilize it to generate power. The aim of this study therefore is to investigate the production, distribution, consumption and wastage/misuse of associated gas in a typical gas-processing environment to find out the cost and effect of gas flaring. The methodology adopted to gather data involves case studies, interviews, questionnaires, artefacts and observations. The investigation site has seven gas production wells with an output of 7.2 million cubic meters per day (mmcmd). While 91.7% of this output is supplied to customers for consumption, the remaining 8.3% is controllably flared. The flared quantity increases with reduction in customers’ demand and during production down time. It was found in the investigation that an average power station comprising three gas turbines and one steam turbine utilises about 3.0 mmcmd of gas to generate approximately 600-650MW of electricity. Consequently, this research proposes that with the employment of an additional gas turbine, substantial quantity of the flared gas could be sustainably used to generate power if the flaring process is properly manage
Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Flexible Automation & Intelligent Manufacturing; FAIM 2014
No full textPaper presented at the Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Flexible Automation & Intelligent Manufacturing, held May 20-23, 2014 in San Antonio, Texas, and organized by the Center for Advanced Manufacturing and Lean Systems, University of Texas at San Antonio; Includes bibliographical references; The most challenging aspect of introducing an offshore wind energy facility is high cost of capital for transportation and installation of wind turbines. The cost associated with transportation and installation depends on the required time to complete these processes and the time requirement can be minimized by optimum selection of many variables of transportation and installation operations such as onshore preassembly of turbines, rated power output of each turbine and number of turbines in the wind farm. Impact of these decision variables on total time requirement of transportation and installation is investigated in this paper, and a time estimation model for wind turbine installation and transportation is developed. Effect of wind farm and vessel parameters on time requirement is studied. Also a numerical study is performed to illustrate the model. The results show that total time requirement is significantly impacted by turbine size and pre-assembly metho
Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Flexible Automation & Intelligent Manufacturing; FAIM 2014
No full textPaper presented at the Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Flexible Automation & Intelligent Manufacturing, held May 20-23, 2014 in San Antonio, Texas, and organized by the Center for Advanced Manufacturing and Lean Systems, University of Texas at San Antonio; Includes bibliographical references; A big challenge for companies is to make the steps between product design and process configuration more agile and adaptable. Some potential areas of performance improvement include; connecting product design to process design and automating the set-up of manufacturing equipment for material handling, machine tools, bar-code readers and vision stations. Progress in these areas will allow for customer requirements to be utilized efficiently in developing instructions for a Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS). The result would be a faster turnaround for new products and changes to customer roles in developing the products. One option is to streamline the creation of routing sheets, work instructions and programs that contain all product information and the strategies for making and inspecting the product. A key to this effort are the Application Programmable Interface (API) tools available in software throughout the product development and manufacturing cycle. If a library of programs can be created and made available for each station in the cell for different product configurations, the API could select and automatically load these programs including data (e.g. tooling, jigs, and fixtures) and make the cell very easy to set-up. A company could increase customer involvement in product development without a huge cost associated with re-configuring the automated system
Evaluation of frameworks development which assist SMEs to adopt best practices; Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Flexible Automation & Intelligent Manufacturing; FAIM 2014
No full textPaper presented at the Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Flexible Automation & Intelligent Manufacturing, held May 20-23, 2014 in San Antonio, Texas, and organized by the Center for Advanced Manufacturing and Lean Systems, University of Texas at San Antonio; Includes bibliographical references; Due to limitations, whether financial, knowledge and skills, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are vulnerable to failure when they decide to adopt best practices techniques. Best practices such as Lean tools are considered to be effective improvement approaches to the elimination of waste, in different forms, within processes. Although many studies which have addressed the application of Lean practices in large companies, this is not the case with SMEs. Therefore, the aim of this study is to review the existing frameworks which have been developed in order to assist SMEs to adopt Lean tools; also to develop a framework which can be adopted by SMEs to assist them to implement appropriate Lean tools, and consideration of limitations of SMEs. To achieve this aim, a comprehensive literature review was conducted to review the existing frameworks, followed by developing a theoretical framework appropriate for SMEs to adopt Lean tools. The findings of this study are useful for SMEs as a guide to adopt Lean tools to assist them to avoid the failure experienced by other SMEs. An assessment methodology is presented which brings together the previous developments frameworks for comparison and analysis which will lead to the building of a coherent body of knowledge and open potential for future work. The argument of this paper is that, making decision to select inappropriate lean tool is pure waste. Avoid making the occurrence of such a decision will greatly save resources (time, money) for the company, particularly those SMEs with limited resource. It is intended that the developed model will support the SMEs that are considering the implementation of Lean tool
Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Flexible Automation & Intelligent Manufacturing; FAIM 2014
No full textPaper presented at the Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Flexible Automation & Intelligent Manufacturing, held May 20-23, 2014 in San Antonio, Texas, and organized by the Center for Advanced Manufacturing and Lean Systems, University of Texas at San Antonio; Includes bibliographical references; In recent years, project management has been gradually implemented within China's petroleum geophysical exploration and development engineering. Recently, achievements have been made in the institutionalization, routinization and standardization of project management in petroleum industry. The sustainable development of petroleum enterprises has been ensured by process management, which based on the entire life-cycle of geophysical exploration project. In this paper, the relations between project life-cycle and project management process have been elaborated. Furthermore, the process management based on the entire life-cycle of geophysical exploration project has been established. The author believes that process management would be beneficial to the overall efficiency of petroleum geophysical exploratio
Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Flexible Automation & Intelligent Manufacturing; FAIM 2014
No full textPaper presented at the Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Flexible Automation & Intelligent Manufacturing, held May 20-23, 2014 in San Antonio, Texas, and organized by the Center for Advanced Manufacturing and Lean Systems, University of Texas at San Antonio; Includes bibliographical references; Rough mills embody the process of cutting up kiln-dried lumber to components used by discrete wood products manufacturers to manufacture products like furniture, kitchen cabinets, flooring, or other items. Rough mills traditionally have either ripped the lumber first (e.g., the lumber is first cut into strips lengthwise) then cut the strips to the required part lengths or they crosscut the lumber first to part lengths (e.g., cutting the lumber to shorter, full width segments) then ripped the segments to the required part widths. Both processes offer advantages and disadvantages and, depending on the input lumber geometry (e.g., size) and the cutting bill requirements (e.g., the size of the resulting components) may result in higher yield for individual cases. Using ROMI 4.1, a rough mill simulator that simulates real-world rough mills and can combine rip and chop operations, this study investigated the potential benefits from using such a dual system. Findings suggest that cutting bills requiring small parts when cutting from lower quality lumber produce better yield when a rip-first approach is used, while cutting bills asking for wide and long parts perform better when material is chopped first. However, in every case, yield can still be improved when the decision to rip or to chop first is made on each individual boar
Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Flexible Automation & Intelligent Manufacturing; FAIM 2014
No full textPaper presented at the Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Flexible Automation & Intelligent Manufacturing, held May 20-23, 2014 in San Antonio, Texas, and organized by the Center for Advanced Manufacturing and Lean Systems, University of Texas at San Antonio; Includes bibliographical references; Machining stoppage occurs from time to time due to various reasons. For the current CNC system using G/M code as part program, to recovery from the stoppage, the operator needs to scroll the part program to find the specific lines where the stoppage happens and make changes to it, because the part program only contains low level machining information, i.e. tool-paths. This process highly relies on operator's experience and is time-consuming. STEP-NC as a new standard for part program defines the machining of a workpiece by workingsteps of machining features, which include geometry information and machining strategy for each feature. Helped by that information in STEP-NC part program, the system is able to plan the retracting toolpath, use different strategies to recover from the stoppage and even regenerate new toolpath for an alternative cutter if the same one is unavailable. When using traditional CNC system, the machining of unfinished workpiece cannot be resumed by another machine tool due to the G/M code's hardware dependency. However, the feature-level machining history information can be stored in STEP-NC file and transferred to another machine, which will be used for process planning and toolpath generation. After relocating the workpiece coordinate system in the alternative machine, the machining can be resume
Andrea Figueroa - Creating Change conference
No full textElectronic Records related to MS 434, Community Alliance for A United San Antonio (CAUSA). The CAUSA\Andrea Figueroa\Creating Change conference folder contains a Powepoint document created for the Creating Change Conference in 2014
Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Flexible Automation & Intelligent Manufacturing; FAIM 2014
No full textPaper presented at the Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Flexible Automation & Intelligent Manufacturing, held May 20-23, 2014 in San Antonio, Texas, and organized by the Center for Advanced Manufacturing and Lean Systems, University of Texas at San Antonio; Includes bibliographical references; Simulation optimization is a widely used methodology for complex stochastic system design. Though the simulation provides a flexible tool for model building, the optimization process could be very challenging due to the cumbersome computing times. A paired-t confidence interval based ranking and selection method is developed to tackle such a problem. The survive probability of each candidate system is calculated with the lower and upper bounds of the confidence interval obtained using paired-t comparison method. The proposed method is tested with several numerical examples. The experimental results suggest that the proposed method outperforms the other classical Ranking and Selection procedure
Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Flexible Automation & Intelligent Manufacturing; FAIM 2014
No full textPaper presented at the Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Flexible Automation & Intelligent Manufacturing, held May 20-23, 2014 in San Antonio, Texas, and organized by the Center for Advanced Manufacturing and Lean Systems, University of Texas at San Antonio; Includes bibliographical references; In today's busy, highly competitive market, businesses are under increasing pressure to meet targets and achieve their objectives. Previous research has shown that SMEs not only need to satisfy customer requirements, but must also meet shareholders’ demands for returns on their investments. There is a wealth of research publications available to SMEs especially on the use of continuous improvement techniques; however, SMEs do not always make use of these facilities. This research focuses on analysis of a web-based process tool to quantify improvements that can be used as an incentive to gain management commitment and to support other SMEs within a community of practice in order to implement improvements in a manufacturing environment. Using Action Research in an SME environment inefficiencies have been identified and classified. The Internet portal will provide user-friendly access to Continuous Improvement CI tools suitable for SMEs within a community of practice and will contain simple to use CI tools which will enhance business productivity. The overall objective is to motivate SMEs within a community of practice to adopt process improvement techniques, especially those generated by academic research, and thereby minimise waste in the business environmen