Quality Improvement of a Tire Manufacturing Assembly Line

Abstract

The automotive industry has grown at a global level, driven by quality requirements and productivity indexes which, together with the increasing process automation, point the way to the implementation of the industry 4.0. The scrap rate that the industry produces induces a huge ecological footprint, which has been increasingly studied, in order to obtain a greener production. The present study aims to reduce to acceptable values an imperfection addressed as "step" (lack of strip alignment) that occurs during the amendment of the breaker used in tire manufacturing, resulting from the associated cutting processes. The investigation into the current process revealed that the three main causes of this flaw were the breaker tensioning, material adhesiveness, and operator, with the first two accounting for a higher preponderance.  Proposals were made to mitigate these lacks of conformance, and the outcomes enabled the process to be greatly improved to acceptable imperfection levels.