Equipment Design and Development: The Control System Feedback Approach to Reverse Engineering

Abstract

In many manufacturing engineering organizations, equipment is several years old, and as a result of this, engineering design details and manufacturing documentation may possibly not be available or obsolete. Manufacturing and subsequent replacement of such equipment can turn out to be a major setback. The dearth of knowledge about the functioning of the equipment, inadequate technical information and unspecified operating conditions hampers the design, development and production of this equipment. The reverse engineering technique approach is key to solving the problems of equipment lacking detailed design drawings. This paper aims at proposing a methodology to solving the manufacturing of equipment lacking engineering design details or computer-aided design (CAD) models. The use of control system feedback approach to design and analysis of equipment which provide and help to determine the input / output relationship between components in the form of block diagrams is presented. Its main contribution is in model derivation in the form of equipment transfer functions or state space, synthesis and analysis of the equipment to produce design details. Lastly, the feedback model approach with the DC motor is illustrated.