Design and Development of Spring Testing Setup

Abstract

In today's competitive market, industries continuously strive to improve the quality of their product. To achieve this, various tests are being carried out at initial stages of product design. But, no matter how robust or ingenious or cost effective the design maybe, if the quality of parts being used are not at par, the cost of the design will not re fect in the end product which will cause a loss at the design level itself, this can prove to be a major setback overall. Hence, it is essential that we improve and maintain the quality of the end product, assembly, starting right down at the individual part level. As a part of this project, a testing setup has been developed to check the quality of the springs. The springs tested by this setup will be used in the MCCB and ACB being manufactured at L & T EBG plant, Vadodara. This setup consists of electrical actuators, mechanical fixtures, computer software, and control system. The working of the system is straightforward, but the design should be robust, easy to use and being highly accurate is a challenge. The springs are tested based on a number of cycles it will endure in the real-world conditions before they break. This is done by pulling and compressing the springs for a number of times, the data thus generated regarding tension over the number of cycles or the break point, etc. are logged, calculated, graphs are plotted and referenced into the database as per requirements of the quality department.