Advanced Manufacturing Engineering

Research Project

The research activities in the Advanced Manufacturing Engineering research group are exemplified by the following two research projects.

Process and Product Optimisation

One of the core issues manufacturing industries face is the difficulty of extracting the full potential from their assets. This may be seen in many different ways: issues with fixed or variable costs being too high; manufacturing constraints meaning that you cannot meet customer demands for volume, flexibility or quality performance; asset wear leading to higher maintenance costs and reduced production capability; or high levels of product, effluent or resource waste. There may also be issues with the systems and people supporting the manufacturing processes such as inefficient or bureaucratic work processes; lack of professional problem solving tools and techniques or simply organisational overload.

We also bring domain knowledge and an operational heritage as well as modern improvement techniques for manufacturing and service industries. The group has extensive benchmarking databases and business performance analysis tools. By ensuring the right balance of automation, systems and people improvements help companies to achieve sustainable change that delivers the benefits as quickly and smoothly as possible whilst ensuring that the benefits do not wither and die over subsequent years.

Research in this area is led by Dr Vince Hughes, Dr S Onuh and Dr Mohd Razif Idris.

Reverse Engineering

Reverse Engineering (RE) was once considered as something practiced by those who lack original concept, but has now become an engineering science in its own right. The Japanese success in new products development has led to reverse engineering being considered as a design process. In recent years, Europeans and the Americans have “reverse engineered” the reverse engineering process and developed powerful tools to further compress product development cycles. It has been reported in literature (Onuh et al, 2006 and Ding et al, 2004) that many renowned companies and universities are involved in the further development and new applications of RT such as Reverse Engineering (RE).

Reverse engineering through Rapid Prototyping (RP) of Stereolithography (SL) models and 3D scanners are essential nowadays for rapid development of machine parts, sculptured products and styling objects. There is an extensive amount of research in the open literature discussing agile and flexible manufacturing philosophies. Our goal is to always move one step further than the rest of the knowledge out there so that we might increase our understanding and the understanding of people around us in order that the benefits would be fully explored.