Advanced Computing in the Age of AI | Thursday, March 28, 2024

Racking Up the Profits! 

<img style="float: left;" src="http://media2.hpcwire.com/dmr/Rack_feature_image_3.jpg" alt="" width="90" height="67" />Racking and tooling is the lifeblood of the plating industry. A well designed and optimized rack has a huge impact on productivity and indeed dictates whether you make a loss or profit.

Racking and tooling is the lifeblood of the plating industry. A well designed and optimized rack has a huge impact on productivity and indeed dictates whether you make a loss or profit. Platers essentially use the same chemicals, similar production lines and pay similar operator rates. Effective rack design is what positions your cost base and quality favorably against your competition.

Introduction
The essence of the plating business is straightforward: you figure out how to plate components within customer specification as quickly and as efficiently as possible, you get the contract and execute. The more parts you fit on a rack the better, but how many can you put on a rack and when do you know if you are at the optimum – what is your competitor doing? Indeed, is the project profitable?

What is it worth?
Would you pay double the typical price for a rack if it would return double your productivity? What if it increased your productivity by 10% - how do you make this judgment?

Some numbers
Based on considerable experience, one of our clients estimated they could plate 368 parts on a rack. To be conservative they quoted based on 320 components. The drop out was so bad they removed every other contact and succeeded to plate 150 parts per rack – eventually bringing this up to 200 by trial and error and expenditure of more than $20K in materials and rack iterations, not to mention time and expense in tying up production plant and staff while testing each and every rack iteration.

The 320 rack should have earned annual revenues of $952K but the racking disaster dropped this to $595K or an annual profit of $337K. An additional 50 components per rack would increase the annual profits by $84,000, on this one program alone. Good rack design at the outset massively impacts revenues for years to come.

Another viewpoint: Every single component successfully added to the rack resulted in an additional, recurrent, annual profit of $1,680.

Example Case
For another client, Elsyca used plating simulation tools to accurately predict, upfront, the component coverage for any proposed rack design. For production purposes it might be beneficial to employ only one rack design for a family of components – how can you evaluate this without manufacturing dozens of prototype racks?


The challenge of course is that all levers are a different design, some incorporating sharp edges. The largest lever has twice the surface area to plate, compared to the smallest lever.


Considering geometry, production targets and experience, a first rack configuration is proposed. This is then simulated for all 10 lever designs. Figure 1, quantifies the thickness distribution on each and every lever but the scorecard shown in Figure 3 was used to assess the baseline situation in a glance. For one lever, the drop out was 42%!

The simulations enables investigation of concerns such as chrome burn, nickel show, nodular growth and even if the specified rectifiers would be able to handle the production.

Traditionally, racks would have to be designed, fabricated, delivered and tested in between production runs. This takes several weeks per iteration. The computational approach easily allows the accurate assessment of 50 rack configurations within the space of three weeks – without using a drop of electrolyte. The optimum rack design reduced potential drop out to less than 5% and addressed the defects as follows:


Conclusion
If you can plate more components to quality, cost and time compared to your competition, then customer will come to you.

Plating prediction technology enables you to assess and significantly reduce risk in the quoting and manufacturing process. You will know immediately if the plating task is possible within the constraints of your production facility and whether further costs would need to be incurred with more complex tooling. Or indeed, do you walk away and quote another opportunity?

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Ed. note: Dr. Alan Rose is an elected Fellow of the Institute of Mechanical Engineers in the UK, with a BSc Degree in Aeronautical Engineering and a PhD in Chemical & Process Engineering, specializing in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). Alan is a long time advocate of engineering wimulation tools and has been involved in verification, validation, implementation and simulation programs with the US Air Force (Hill, WPAFB), US Navy (Navair-JAX), Rolls-Royce, to mention a few.

For the past eight years Alan has been instrumental in the adoption and application of electrochemical software simulation tools in the process industries for optimizing productivity and yield in the plating sector and assessing impact of design and material choice on galvanic corrosion. Alan is currently based in Atlanta and is responsible for Elsyca’s North American business.
 
Contact Information
 Alan Rose
770-328-1346
[email protected]
 
 

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