Frugal manufacturing in smart factories for widespread sustainable development

Abstract

Manufacturing is a crucial activity of product development that feeds into and is also influenced by the design process. Any material conservation gained during manufacturing directly affects the green credentials of a product. Manufacturing waste can be contrived to approach zero through a recently developed frugal design approach that quantifies resource conservation at all stages of development of a product engineered for frugality. Accordingly, this effort presents frugal manufacturing (FM), integral to the frugal design approach , for utmost reduction of waste while aiming for good surface integrity, better properties, minimal number of processes and low cost. Other than saving on energy and hence emissions, the new concept of FM also goes beyond current near net shape technologies, which advocate mainly for zero wastage and suitable properties while using a narrow range of manufacturing processes. Case studies involving high-speed machining , superplastic forming and additive manufacturing of aerospace alloys have been presented that bring out the features and benefits of FM. As such the multipronged objectives of FM should be dovetailed with those of smart factories for creating novel technologies that abet widespread sustainable development. Such enhancement of the smart factories concept has been argued to support unusual applications such as the fight against pandemics including the current one involving COVID-19.

A cutting tool architecture designed to address the parasitic mechanisms consuming excess power during machining and manufacturing operations–A review-based study towards sustainable manufacturing

“…For instance, increased tool wear could lead to increased chatter and cutting forces and thereby, continue to bring down the efficiency of machining processes. Minimizing these parasitic mechanisms and ideally avoiding them, affordably through a suitably designed cutter will unlock the significant potential of frugal manufacturing [ 25 ] for sustainable development.…”

“…The current paper elaborates the design framework and presents a literature-based analysis of its performance in combating the various parasitic mechanisms. Such a cutter design will facilitate frugal manufacturing of metallic materials wherein the focus is on improving surface quality while consuming lesser energy affordably [ 25 ].…”

Frugal Engineering of Advanced Frugal Innovations for Global Sustainability Entrepreneurship

“…Even the last stage of product development, quality control has a lot in store for entrepreneurs when frugality is adopted in modern engineering. Stringent quality control of both product -performance and rigour in adhering to the principles of FE is very important for the success of AFIs (Rao, 2021b). Since quality control, especially the stringent type, is usually associated with higher costs, good entrepreneurship will be needed to reconcile with low-cost feature of an AFI while maintaining its quality.…”

“…Manufacturing is also a crucial pillar of FE, and a frugal version accounts for low cost, low wastage and excellent quality of parts/products fabricated from process(es) (Rao, 2021a). Frugal manufacturing entails retrofitting existing machine-tool systems or making novel frugal machine-tool systems (FMTS) to carry out the frugal versions of the manufacturing process(es) (Rao, 2021a).…”

“…Manufacturing is also a crucial pillar of FE, and a frugal version accounts for low cost, low wastage and excellent quality of parts/products fabricated from process(es) (Rao, 2021a). Frugal manufacturing entails retrofitting existing machine-tool systems or making novel frugal machine-tool systems (FMTS) to carry out the frugal versions of the manufacturing process(es) (Rao, 2021a). In fact, frugal manufacturing is one of the components of the factor of frugality that is important for making AFIs from scratch or transforming existing products to the advanced frugal type.…”