FATIGUE ANALYSIS OF A CUTTING PAD TO INCREASE THE PRODUCTIVITY IN AUTOMOTIVE SPRINGS

ABSTRACT In recent years, the demands of customers in the automotive industry have driven accelerated technological advances. Organizations seek to develop improvements in their processes that enable them to meet customer expectations. The spring manufacturing process has evolved in tandem with the increasing quality requirements of products from major automobile manufacturers. Customers demand high quality at low prices, which involves maximizing resources for the production of auto parts, such as materials, human resources, energy, time, equipment, and capital. In this project, an increase of over 200% in the performance of the rectangular spring cutting pad was achieved. A finite element analysis (ANSYS) was performed, which yielded an average fatigue life of 12,150 cycles for the cutting pads. To validate these results, an experimental design of the cutting pads was conducted, considering the relief angle of the pad and the type of manufacturing material as independent variables. The literature lacks information related to the performance and cost savings of the cutting process, making the results of this research particularly valuable. A reduction in the operating cost of the cutting system was achieved, from $0.075 per piece to $0.0026 per piece, representing an 85.1% decrease in manufacturing costs associated with the cutting operation, which directly impacts the company's profit margins. Keywords: Fatigue, cutting process, spring, cutting tablet, design of experiments, relief angle.