Engineering post-doctoral fellows Sameh Badrous and Tarek AlGeddawy show one of the desk sets they assembled in the Intelligent Manufacturing Systems Centre.

Throughout history, eras have been characterized by the types of materials, machines and technology we’ve created: The Iron Age. The Industrial Revolution. The Information Age.

In the complex world of product manufacturing, a UWindsor engineering professor believes we’ve already entered a new era.

Hoda ElMaraghy.

“This is the age of variation,” says Hoda ElMaraghy, a Canada Research Chair in Manufacturing Systems and director of the University’s Intelligent Manufacturing Systems Centre. “Change is here to stay and we have to embrace it.”

Dr. ElMaraghy is a firm believer in the need for product manufacturers to be more responsive to increasing consumer demand for greater variety and customization of their wares. The new paradigm to meet this challenge is changeable and reconfigurable manufacturing, and nowhere is it more evident than in her lab, located in the University’s new $112-million Centre for Engineering Innovation.

The IMSC is home to an iDesign Studio and iFactory which provide students and researchers with the capability to create new products from the design through prototype, measure, inspect, and manufacture. They can study how manufacturing systems evolve as products are introduced, and most importantly, find new ways to prolong the lives of those systems to become more economically sustainable.

“There’s nothing else like this in North America – a truly reconfigurable factory in a lab,” said ElMaraghy, a panellist at the Canadian Science Writers’ Association conference, being held in Windsor this June. Delegates who attend the conference will also get to tour the IMS centre. “This is a teaching and research environment, but it’s a very real environment. It has the latest industrial equipment and it offers a unique experiential learning opportunity.”

At the back of the lab, there’s a large 70-inch multi-touch flat screen monitor, where students can interactively design and make modifications to the new products they plan to create.

“It encourages discussion at the design and innovations stage,” she said. “You can have several people working together on component and product design.”

Post design, plastic models of the products are built in a rapid prototyping room that uses a fused deposition system, before being sent off to check their specifications in the Coordinate Measurement Metrology room.

From there, they go into production in the iFactory, a highly-automated, modular assembly line that can make just about anything you can imagine would fit on a 6.5 x 6.5 inch pallet. The first product the engineers made is a desk set, which holds pens, paper clips, a thermometer, a clock and other items. The line can make up to 200 variations of the set and has the capacity to produce up to 300 pieces an hour. The next product they’re considering assembling is a tensioner for automotive serpentine belts.

The system’s most important feature is its ability to respond quickly to consumer demands for different product variants and order quantities, ElMaraghy said.

“If the product changed we can reconfigure the entire assembly system in a very short time,” she said. “We can add modules or take others out if the production volumes change, and they have intelligent systems built in that automatically recognizes when the line has changed and reconfigures its controller, which addresses concerns about change-over time when ramping up for new products. So this new paradigm adds a great deal of efficiency for the manufacturer.”

Kush Aggraval, Jesleer Budhiraja and Luv Aggraval display a model of the "de-dusting" conveyor system they designed for a nutraceutical company.

Working with a team of UWindsor engineering students to help his business find ways to be more efficient was an opportunity Angelo Fallone would recommend to any company looking to improve its operations.

“I’d give it a nine out of 10,” the finance administrator at a Ruthven agricultural packaging company said when asked to rate the experience. “We need to be innovative and efficient. A lot of skilled labour has made its way out of the automotive industry and in to the agricultural industry.”

Fallone (Honours BCO – 2008), works at Clifford Produce, a local packager and supplier of such agricultural products as cucumbers, tomatoes and peppers. He worked with fourth year industrial engineering students David Impens, Thomas Flood and Melina Portillo on ways to improve the capacity and speed of the company’s cocktail tomato packaging line.

The team was working on its capstone project, an annual rite of passage for upper-level undergraduates which pairs them with industry partners to find solutions to operational problems. Students get valuable field experience while their partners get fresh sets of eyes examining their most pressing issues. Projects were presented last week to fellow students, academic supervisors and industrial partners who were on hand to question them about the validity of their solutions.

Some of the projects showcased included a floating, solar-powered pump and aerator to help remove algae and improve oxygen levels in ponds on golf courses, parks and other recreational areas; changes to an assembly system to help a local nutraceutical company polish its capsules, cut down on dust accumulation and improve ergonomics; ways for an automotive fuel tank manufacturer to improve its cycle time; and a feasibility study for a packaging company to reclaim rain water.

The Clifford team conducted a research literature review, did time and motor studies and collected data about the inventory and amount of available floor space at the facility. They designed a bracket on the packaging machine that substantially increased production by reducing changeover time, while improving the ergonomics and safety of the operations.

In fact, if all the recommendations the students devised to improve the facilities overall operations were fully implemented, they’d save the company a total of $107,000 a year, Impens said. He realized however, that developing solutions and putting them into practice are vastly different, which he said was one of the projects most valuable lessons.

“We learned that it’s so easy to change things on paper but a lot harder to make changes in a real facility,” he said.

Fallone said his first contact with the university was at a meeting held last year in Leamington by the Office of Research Services. Sponsored by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, the “connector” event was held to help foster new relationships between local businesses in need of assistance and academics seeking out opportunities for research collaborations. He met with Horst Schmidt, the university’s business development and research commercialization officer, who eventually connected him with Hoda ElMaraghy, the engineering professor who oversaw the students.

He said the changes the students suggested will ultimately improve the working conditions for the company’s employees.

“It helps make their life better and that’s the biggest thing we’ve seen,” he said.