Senthil Kumar

Facility layout design determines how to arrange, locate and distribute the machines, departments , equipment and support services in a manufacturing facility to achieve minimization of overall production time, maximization of operational and arrangement flexibility, maximization of turnover of work-in-process and maximization of factory output in conformance with production schedules. It is essential to have a well developed plant layout for all the available resources in an optimum manner and get the maximum out of the capacity of the facilities. The work in the present paper is based on study conducted in an Aqua Dire Purified Mineral Water Factory located at Dire Dawa, Ethiopia, which manufactures water bottles and soft drinks. In existing plant layout the arrangement of materials and space utilization are not properly used due to improper of facility layouts. The scope of the work is on four sections commonly known as section 1(Raw Materials), section 2 (Blow molding), section 3(Injection molding) and section 4 (Raw Materials) of the company. This research aims to improve the facility layout design in an Aqua Dire purified mineral water and soft drink factory to eliminate obstruction in material arrangement and thus obtain maximum productivity. The newly proposed facility layout enhance productivity of the company in terms of reducing material searching time, providing well arrangements of facility and good working environment.

In this work, a detailed analysis was performed to profoundly study the tribological property of various
nano clay (Cloisite 25A) loaded epoxy, with and without inclusion of E-glass fiber using Taguchi’s technique.
For this purpose, the test samples were prepared according to the ASTM standard, and the test was
carried out with the assistance of pin-on-disk machine. To proceed further, L25 orthogonal array was constructed
to evaluate the tribological property with four control variables such as filler content, normal
load, sliding velocity and sliding distance at each level. The results indicated that the combination of factors
greatly influenced the process to achieve the minimum wear and coefficient of friction. Overall, the
experiment results depicted least wear and friction coefficient for fiber reinforced laminates. In the same
way, appreciable wear and friction coefficient was noted for without fiber laminates. Additionally, the SN
ratio results too exhibited the similar trend. Moreover, ANOVA analysis revealed that the fiber inclusion
on laminates has lesser contribution on coefficient of friction and wear when compared to without fiber
laminates. At last, the microstructure behavior of the test samples was investigated with an assistance of
Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) to analyze the surface morphology.