Abstract
Manual operations feature prominently in the manufacture of many electrical machines. Even though high-volume electrical machine manufacture is dominated by automation, several manufacturing operations continue to involve manual intervention because of the complexity of such operations makes them heavily reliant on high dexterity manual skills and experience. However, quality can be variable due to human involvement. Currently, in order to maintain a high precision of control and required tolerances of the final machine, inspection is performed at various steps during manufacturing and assembly. Detecting a defect at these end-of-line tests can result in significant wasted time and costs due to rework or scrappage. The solution to this problem lies in in-process monitoring particularly for error prone manual operations. This paper presents a literature review of the state-of-the-art available techniques and limitations in process monitoring within the context of electrical machine manufacturing. To quantify the degree of manual activities in process monitoring within electrical machine manufacture, a structured survey of UK based companies was conducted, identifying specific error prone manual processes to target, and gaps in inspection. The survey identified that a significant proportion of activities in electrical machine manufacture are manual, or semi-automated with manual interventions. However, literature review revealed only a limited research in in-process monitoring of manual operations in this area. Finally, two case studies are presented where case study 1 presents a framework for digitisation of a variety of manual manufacturing tasks, and case study 2 demonstrates real-time capture, modelling and analysis of deformable linear objects in electrical machine manufacturing.
Highlights
The global shift towards cleaner growth and lowering carbon emissions has resulted in significant on-going changes in ways energy is generated and utilised
This paper has presented a review of state of the art in process monitoring for manual operations in electrical machine manufacturing
Winding/wiring and making connections were identified as highly error prone manual activities and emphasis was laid on the value that could be accrued from in-process monitoring during these operations
Summary
The global shift towards cleaner growth and lowering carbon emissions has resulted in significant on-going changes in ways energy is generated and utilised. As a typical electrical machine production process is a combination of many traditional manufacturing techniques (Figure 1) in some cases it can be complex to track the original source of the observed failure These drawbacks of EoL testing can be addressed by creating solutions for in-process monitoring/inspection to immediately identify and react to detected defects without having to wait until the final stage of the manufacturing chain.[23]. Details of the profiles of five researchers including their roles, years of
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