Laboratory for Manufacturing and Sustainability

The presence of solid particle contaminant chips in high performance and complex automotive components like cylinder heads of internal combustion engines is a source of major concern for the automotive industry. Current industrial cleaning technologies, simply relying on the fluid transport energy of high pressure or intermittent high impulse jets discharged at the water jacket inlets of the cylinder head, fail to capture the dynamics of interaction between the chip morphology and the complex workpiece landscape. This work provides a preliminary insight into an experimental investigation of the mechanics of chip transport at play, and how it can be used to build an effective chip optimization model that significantly aids in improving the cleanability of contaminant chips. The objective is to relate the mechanics of chip transport with the chip form parameters as much as possible, which makes the objective and constraints in the optimization model quantifiable. The end objective is of course to transmit this information upstream of the manufacturing pipeline in the form of a Design for Cleanability (DFC) feedback, which highlights the industrial cleaning problem as a design centric issue.