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Introduction Corrosion has been described as one of the scourges of civilisation. It would appear to be almost a universal phenomenon occurring in the home, on the roads—particularly in road vehicles—in the factory, on the farm, in vessels at sea, in aircraft in the sky, and in pipelines underground. Corrosion is not confined to metallic materials—although they are the major victims—in that stone, brickwork and concrete are also subject to corrosive attack. In Britain alone the annual cost of corrosion has been calculated to be over £600 million in materials replacement, maintenance costs and lost production; the annual world cost has been estimated as at least £10,000 million.

NEW SOLDERING FLUX CUTS CORROSION. Experiments carried out at the Tin Research Institute have resulted in a new soldering process in which the flux spreads more smoothly and quietly over a wider area with scarcely any spattering of the metal. Mr. W. R. Lewis, assistant director of the Institute, who conducted the experiments, used polyethylene glycol—now commercially available—in place of acidified water as a vehicle for acid fluxes.

The recent shift towards accommodating flexibility in manufacturing companies and the complexity resulting from product variety highlight the significance of flexible assembly systems and designing products for them. The purpose of this paper is to provide insight into the requirements of a flexible assembly system for product design from the assembly system’s standpoint.

To fulfil the purpose of the paper, a literature review and a case study were performed. The case study was conducted with an interactive research approach in a global market leader company within the heavy vehicle manufacturing industry.

The findings indicate that common assembly sequence, similar assembly interfaces, and common parts are the main requirements of a flexible assembly system for product design which reduce complexity and facilitate various flexibility dimensions. Accordingly, a model is proposed to broaden the understanding of these requirements from the assembly system’s standpoint.

This study contributes to the overlapping research area of flexible assembly systems and product design.

The proposed model is largely based on practical data and clarifies the role of product design in facilitating flexibility in an assembly system. It can be used by assembly managers, assembly engineers, and product designers.

The key originality of this paper compared to the previous studies lies in presenting a novel assembly-oriented design model. The model enhances understanding of a flexible assembly system’s requirements for product design with regard to reducing complexity and managing variation in a flexible assembly system. These requirements can be applied to product design across various product families within a company’s product portfolio.

What is maintenance? Almost every maintenance engineer in the country is interested in corrosion—but there are many thousands of them and almost as many ways of thinking about the subject. The reason for this lies principally in the fact that whereas all corrosion is a maintenance problem, not all maintenance problems are concerned with corrosion, and the attitude adopted will vary according to the relative importance of corrosion and the engineer's many other maintenance responsibilities.

CORROSION is a continual problem for those who are responsible for metal structures and the well‐known Southend Pier provides Mr. Frank Flintoff, the pier manager, and his staff with a never‐ending task of protecting the mile‐and‐a‐third‐long steel framework against exposure to a heavily salt‐laden atmosphere. The pier is situated on the Essex side of the Thames Estuary and the scheme of protection devised for the Southend Pier has to take into consideration also the pitting and chemical effect of minute cement particles which are carried towards the pier by the prevailing south‐west wind from a factory six miles away on the other side of the estuary.

By the beginning of the war, Germany's over‐all self‐sufficiency in food had reached a level of approximately 83 per cent., on the peace‐time basis of 2,200—2,400 calories per person per day. In respect to some types of food, however, the situation was not satisfactory. For example, before the war she produced approximately 73 per cent. of fish requirements, 12 per cent. of corn, 50 per cent. of legumes, and 60 per cent. of fat within her own boundaries. The country could be fed at a reduced level by the produce raised within its own boundaries if food were perfectly controlled and evenly distributed. However, in practice, individual provinces were much less favourably situated in this respect. Western Germany, an area of relatively small and diversified farms, was critically dependent on the eastern provinces for its flour, grain, and potato supplies. It is clear that all German civilians could be fed at a uniform level of adequacy during a war only by control of the country's food supply at the national level and by the continued operation of the new transportation network of the country. For this reason the bombing of rail and inland water transportation facilities became such a serious threat to national uniformity in food distribution. Of the many kinds of centralised food processing industries known in the United States, only a few played an important role in the food supply of German civilians. The principal examples of these were grain milling, sugar production and refining, and the large bakeries of urban areas. The damage or destruction of these facilities, incidental to air attack on other industrial targets, seriously decreased their production capacity. Bombing destroyed the mills for processing 9 per cent. of the German rye output and 35 per cent. of the wheat output. Of the sugar refineries four plants producing 300,000 tons annually, were destroyed. This represents a 38 per cent. decrease in production of sugar. Similarly bombing of chemical plants was largely responsible for the decrease in the supply for fertiliser nitrogen. In 1939, 718,000 tons of fertiliser nitrogen were available, but by 1945 this had decreased to 140,000 tons. The significance of this destruction of facilities vital to the feeding of a country already on a border‐line diet is ominous. Reliable estimates indicate that aerial bombings destroyed 35 per cent. of Germany's total (approximately 460,000 square metres) cold storage capacity. The increased use of cold storage intensified their dependence on transportation and on the continuity of the power supply. Aerial attack, as a result, not only decreased usable cold storage space, but also seriously interfered with the operation of the remaining space by impeding shipments and interrupting sources of power. It was the constantly reiterated opinion of all food officials that the bomb destruction of the transportation network was the largest single factor contributing to the disruption of the food supply. Bulk shipments which had been carried on inland waterways were seriously impeded by the bombing of canals. Aerial attack against railway lines, bridges and terminal facilities caused widespread interruptions in service and destroyed rolling stock, freight en route and handling facilities at terminals. It is not possible at this time to state exactly in what measure the curtailment of the national diet contributed to the ultimate defeat of Germany. The evidence available indicates, however, that it was an important factor. There is in any case no doubt that strategic bombing is the major element contributing to the present shortage of food in Germany. It was not apparent that the Germans considered the vitamin and mineral content of food in determining the ration allowances of the people. Immediately with the beginning of the war, all the principal foods were rationed, so that the lack of recognition of the importance of the vitamin and mineral content of this ration actually was an additional point of vulnerability for the German diet. With a food economy so vulnerable it is not surprising to have found that the basic food rationing programme was abandoned early in 1945 when the destruction of transport and communications by the strategic air offensive attained major proportions. This necessitated falling back on the inadequate system of regional self‐supply. The destruction of large food stocks, processing plants and cold storage plants by bombing also contributed to the general deterioration of the German food supply. There is ample evidence for the conclusion that as a result of the strategic air offensive the nutritional demands for the continued health of the German people could not be met.

A process improvement sampling methodology, known as process variation diagnostic tool (PROVADT), was proposed by Cox et al. (2013). The method was designed to support the objectivity of Six Sigma projects performing the measure-analyse phases of the define-measure-analyse-improve-control cycle. An issue in PROVADT is that it is unable to distinguish between measurement and product variation in the presence of a poor Gage repeatability and reproducibility (R&R) result. The purpose of this paper is to improve and address PROVADT’s sampling structure by enabling a true Gage R&R as part of its design.

This paper derives an enhanced PROVADT method by examining the theoretical sampling constraints required to perform a Gage R&R study. The original PROVADT method is then extended to fulfil these requirements. To test this enhanced approach, it was applied first to a simulated manufacturing process and then in two industry case studies.

The results in this paper demonstrates that enhanced PROVADT was able to achieve a full Gage R&R result. This required 20 additional measurements when compared to the original method, but saved up to ten additional products and 20 additional measurements being taken in future experiments if the original method failed to obtain a valid Gage R&R. These benefits were highlighted in simulation and industry case studies.

The work into the PROVADT method aims to improve the objectivity of early Six Sigma analyses of quality issues, which has documented issues.