-> a- High severity rankings in
PFMEA's can indicate
-> presence of special PRODUCT characteristics. Do you
-> agree?
Yes - typically.
-> b- many of the causes can be considered as PROCESS
-> characterisitics, like conditions of the die, temperature
-> set, speed etc. Do you agree?
Yes. In injection molding, for example, critical characteristics *may* include injection time, hold time, hold pressure, mold temperature, hotrunner temperature (if you're using hotrunners), etc. Turn speed and feed speed are sometimes critical in cutting operations. But again, it depends upon the product. If you're injection molding small 2 inch toy dolls for cracker jack boxes you're not going to be real critical about some parameters. On the other hand, in airbag cover injection molding, particularly because of the tear strip characteristics (which are *very* critical), all I mentioned above and more are critical to the process and thus have to be monitored and controlled including calibrated thermocouple systems, etc.
-> c- Now my question was can we decide among so many causes
-> which are "SPECIAL PROCESS CHARACTERISTICS"? Or maybe
-> this premise that PFMEA helps in identifying special
-> process characteristics is wrong?
When determining what YOUR critical or special characteristics are you first look to the document which defines what, to your company, should be a critical or special characteristic. Then you look at everything and ask for each one "How important is this and why?" Is hold time critical? What are your tolerances.
Now look at your PFMEA and ensure what you think may be critical are on the pfmea. Remember that to do this, someone has to be on the PFMEA team who understands the process and knows what, at least in general, is critical. For example, if injection molding you shold have a process engineer (or similar) who understands injection molding and understands the product. For example, I'm not an injection molding expert, but I know (from experience) what is typically important and what is not with respect to a specific product (which I think I exampled herein with injection molding). Now the pfmea team looks at the items and 'goes to work'. This is a 2" doll. Hold time will probably not be critical. Mold temperature may be important but there's a wide tolerance on the temp so maybe we don't need calibrated instruments but do track temp on a 'reference' gage. There would be no reason to use a hotrunner for such a product. Injection pressure is probably like temperature. You're probably going to get a good fill-out (assuming a rather simple mold) with a wide range of pressures (we're looking at the 'tolerance' here). Flow is not an issue (flow is typically a critical issue in airbag covers because of the tear strip criticality - you can't have any flowlines at the strip). If you don't have an 'expert' your PFMEA team cannot work.
-> Can you suggest a method to identify special proces
-> characterisics?
Specifically what process and what is the product?
-> what comes on the blueprint CAN only be a special PRODUCT
-> charaterisitic, not a process characteristic?
Yes - there can be a mixture of product characteristics, materials requirements, processing requirements, packaging requirements and other 'requirements'. Lots of stuff *can* be put on a print.
[This message has been edited by Marc Smith (edited 08 May 2001).]