Improving the Efficiency of Steam Turbine Rotor Manufacturing

Sharanakumar, Dr. Chethan Kumar C S, S. Appaiah
2015 International Journal of Engineering Research and  
The project was carried out at a reputed steam turbine rotor manufacturing unit, Bangalore. The product considered is steam turbine rotor used for generating power in sugar plant, it is a job order production. Previously, when this rotor was manufactured, the company was not able to supply the product to the customer at the promised time. The customer was not satisfied with this and demanded that the rotor be supplied in time. The cause for this was that the time required to manufacture this
more » ... ticular rotor was 7207 minutes which is quite high. The objective of this project is to reduce the cycle time of the steam turbine rotor manufacturing. The operations involved in steam turbine rotor manufacturing were noted and data was collected for each operation. The operations were classified into value added and non-value added activities and critical examination was applied to non-value added activities that took place on the CNC machine. The non-value added activities that were identified were approach checking, checking dimension values, inspection and chip cleaning. By the application of critical examination, the non-value added activity time was reduced from 1669 minutes to an estimated time of 635 minutes. Single Minute Exchange of Dies technique was applied for the three set up operations. The activities involved in the set up operations were divided into internal and external activities, reducing external and internal activities and then streamlining the internal activities. By doing so the set up operation time was reduced from 2280 minutes to an estimated time of 2140 minutes. By the application of critical examination and single minute exchange of dies technique, the cycle time to manufacture the steam turbine rotor is reduced from 7207 minutes to 6033 minutes. The estimated savings because of the cycle time reduction is found to be Rs. 1, 17,400/-.
doi:10.17577/ijertv4is041417 fatcat:zpfdmrnsybbbxbaamsnyi3syvy