Quality-oriented Design of Rotor Assembly Strategies for Electric Drive Production Systems

Electric mobility is an emerging industrial sector that requires innovative quality control methods as common manufacturing and testing methods of combustion engines cannot be transferred directly to electric motors. This paper presents new solutions for the quantitative evaluation of quality-oriented rotor assembly strategies in electric drive production systems. The proposed methods assist the analysis of productivity and quality performance of two different assembly strategies namely selective assembly and sequential assembly. The impacts of these approaches are validated within a real industrial context, where state of the art quality and process control technologies show strong limitations. Experimental results have shown that the application of the proposed strategies yield a significant improvement in the production rate of conforming parts of the system. Moreover, the general applicability of these approaches to similar industrial problems encourages their adoption for defect reduction and elimination thus paving the way to zero-defect manufacturing paradigm.