Assembly Automation and Product Design  (English, Hardcover, Boothroyd Geoffrey)

Addressing design for automated and manual assembly processes, Assembly Automation and Product Design, Second Edition examines assembly automation in parallel with product design. The author enumerates the components, processes, performance, and comparative economics of several types of automatic assembly systems. He provides information on equipment such as transfer devices, parts feeders, feed tracks, placing mechanisms, and robots.

Presenting detailed discussions of product design for assembly, the book contains over 500 drawings, tables, and equations, and numerous problems and laboratory experiments that help clarify and reinforce essential concepts. Highlighting the importance of well-designed products, the book covers design for manual assembly, high-speed automatic and robot assembly, and electronics assembly. The new edition includes the popular Handbook of Feeding and Orienting Techniques for Small Parts, published at the University of Massachusetts, as an appendix. This provides more than 100 pages packed with useful data and information that will help you avoid the costly errors that often plague high-volume manufacturing companies.

In today's extremely competitive, highly unpredictable world, your organization needs to constantly find new ways to deliver value. Performing the same old processes in the same old ways is no longer a viable option. Taking an analytical yet practical approach to assembly automation, this completely revised second edition gives you the skill set you need not only to deliver that value, but to deliver it economically and on time.

Salient Features

• Includes information on how to design automatic feeding and orienting systems for particular parts
• Provides an appreciation of part quality on machine performance and the cost of automatic assembly
• Demonstrates how parts can be designed in order to be economically handled automatically
• Discusses the benefits and how-tos of designing products that make assembly automation feasible
• Covers the potential pitfalls and problems involved in applying automation to assembly processes
• Presents original data and coding systems for product design for manual, high-speed automatic, and robot assembly