Manufacturing Process and Equipment

Manufacturing Processes and Equipment describes and explains existing production processes and machinery using powerful analytical tools of machine science, and applies them to the solution of manufacturing problems.

George Tlusty is a Graduate Research Professor at the University of Florida where he is Director of the Machine Tool Research Center.

Preface I spent the first half of my professional life as designer and researcher in the machine tool industry in Europe. In 19711 emigrated to Canada and joined the mechanical engineering faculty at McMaster University in the heavily industrial town of Hamilton, Ontario. While my primary theoretical background was in structural dynamics and controls, I also taught elasticity and plasticity, design, analytical methods, and heat transfer. However, my main responsibility was for the required course in Manufacturing Engineering (MfgE).At that time there were a number of very good textbooks in MfgE available. I used Doyle et al.,Manufacturing Processes and Materials for Engineers. It was an excellent comprehensive collection of descriptions of techniques, materials, processes, and machines including wellselected illustrations, accompanied by qualitative judgments. Several other books were similar. However, there was very little analytical development of the subjects and no connection or relationship was established between existing books and the traditional mechanical engineering textbooks on vibrations, controls, heat transfer, etc. On the other hand, those other "machine science" courses contained very little physical interpretation and application material that might help to better understand MfgE. Why should the students learn all of the theory if they were not shown that it was useful or needed in the vast and significant field of manufacturing engineering?MfgE was at that time not scientifically esteemed or well developed, and many of the teachers concentrated their lectures on little more than "shop practice:" Since then the situation has changed: There is now a large academic community engaged in extensive research in MfgE. The profile of the teachers has changed substantially and I am happy to have been heavily involved in that transition. Back then, however, I began to write analytical notes as handouts to complement the textbook in my teaching of the course. At the same time I started to learn about computational approaches to solve many of the problems and included them in my teaching. I continued the practice after moving to the University of Florida in 1984, where I met colleagues who joined me in using these handouts in teaching the MfgE course. I continued developing the material that finally was condensed to become the book presented here.It is important to teach students how to formulate problems in MfgE and to show them how to use all the knowledge gained in the specialty background courses to solve these problems. This belief stems from my experience as an industrial researcher and is also based on the 28 years of teaching the topic, giving homework assignments and exams based on analytical exercises, and finding favorable acceptance by the students. It is not enough to simply include large numbers of ready-made equations with little or no analytical development in otherwise descriptive texts on Mfg processes, as has been done by several authors. If the students do not understand how a formula has been obtained they will not be able to use it. It is necessary to present derivations in some detail and to involve the students in developing the corresponding computer programs. This enables them to creatively use other new theoretical and computational approaches to problems that will challenge them in their future work as production engineers.What is the essence of this book, and in what ways is it novel and different from the others on the market? One-half of its mission is to describe and explain existing production processes and machinery whereas the other half is to show how to use the powerful analytical tools of machine science and apply them to the solution of manufacturing problems to further development of the state of the art. In comparison with other books, there is more emphasis on analytical development and application of engineering theory to MfgE problems. This bo