Along the way our team is to develop procedures, documentation and anything else that is essential to an engineering project. Our design problem was brought to us from industry. A company lacated in vacuum coats straws that are used inside the antenna of cell phones. The problem is that the company is manually inserting the straws into the masking fixture and then plugging the ends with rubber stoppers. This process is done in batches.
Prep time is the bottleneck for the entire masking process.
Usually the process must be stopped to allow for the pieces to be put into fixtures and plugged. In case of large orders several days are allocated to just getting pieces prepped and stockpiles for the vacuum process. This is restrictive and costs are high in time spent and labor. The company came to UW-Stout to ask for help in designing and implementing a system that would atumatically plug the stoppers and straws into the fixtures. Since this project was brought into Capstone II our group did not have enough time to devise and design an entire cell and process to do this.