Sunday 8 September 2013

THE IMPORTANCE OF MANUFACTURING ENGINEERING

If we carefully think about human civilization, one shall notice an wonderful fact about human beings. The thing that made us different from other hominids is the skill to manufacture tools. We just triumphed due to our ability to make primitive tools out of stone and metals during the dawn of the civilizations. Since then much time has passed and we have entered into a Machine Era and man has been still continuously engaged in converting the natural resources into useful products by adding value to them through machining and other engineering activities applying on the raw materials. Manufacturing is the sub branch of Engineering which involves the conversion of raw materials into finished products.

The conversion of natural resources into raw materials is normally taken care of by two sub branches of engineering viz. Mining and Metallurgy Engineering. The value addition to the raw materials by shaping and transforming it to final products generally involves several distinct processes like castings, forming, forging, machining, joining, assembling and finishing to obtain a completely finished product.

Understanding Manufacturing Engineering largely based upon three engineering activities and they are Designing,  Production and Development of new more efficient techniques.

At the Design stage, engineering design mainly concentrates on the optimization of engineering activities to achieve most economical way to manufacture a goods from raw materials. It also chooses the raw materials and impart the requisite engineering properties of materials like hardness, strength, elasticity, toughness by applying various heat treatment to them.

During the production stages, the selection of the important process parameters to minimize the idle time and cost, and maximizing the production and its quality is very important.

The New Technologies must be implemented to adapt to the changing scenarios of the markets and demands to make the sales competitive and sustainable.

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