INVESTIGATION TO IMPROVE THE NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT PROCESS OF MONO BLOCK PUMP USING ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING

In today’s global competitive manufacturing, industries are seeking for new ideas to produce products at cheaper price, better quality and deliver quickly. A product may consist of several components. Currently, manufacturers adopt several approaches to produce a product but widely used approaches are Conventional manufacturing and CAD/CAM approach. In the first approach, each component is machined in conventional machine tools and they are assembled together to produce a product. In the second approach, each component is designed and developed using CAD/CAM systems and they are machined using CNC machine tools. These components are then assembled together to form the final product. In our investigation, Additive manufacturing (AM) is used where the final assembled product is produced in a single machining process and there is no assembly operations required. In the first two approaches, the final product is made by removing materials, whereas, in AM, the final product is made by adding materials layer by layer. AM is also known as 3-D printing or Rapid prototyping. In India, mono block pump product is manufactured using conventional machining. In some industry, CAD/CAM approach is used. The cost of this product is high and farmers find it difficult to afford it. In addition, quality of the product is not up to industry benchmark. In this paper, an investigation is carried to determine whether AM can be used as an alternative solution to produce pumps. With this, an attempt is made to improve the quality of the pump and the product development process. From the investigation, the result conclude that additive manufacturing can be used to manufacture pumps with better quality and reduced product development time; however there are restrictions in material constraint.