An increasing number of products are equipped with software and sensors. This suggests that, in order to deliver more customised performance, future products will be developed to accommodate systems that supply information on how these products are used. Today, information on the customer’s way of using a product is seldom factored into product design, but the opportunities for making use of it are increasing dramatically due to the amount of available data that can be logged. The proposed methodology is to formulate Customer Needs at a detailed level to be able to link customer satisfaction with a clear interface to the Design Requirements. These links are obtained by combining information acquired by means of surveys, among other methodologies, as well as usage data from customer products. The method is based on the planning House of Quality and also takes cost and risk into consideration. Risk is estimated using the Analytical Hierarchy Process, whereby a hierarchy of the most relevant customer information is constructed to make designers aware of how customer-focused the design process is. To validate the proposed methodology an illustrative example is presented. Results show that the method provides valuable information that enables the company to remain customer-focused during the whole process but also when strategic decisions on price and product launch are made.

Customer satisfaction is used by many companies as a keyperformance indicator and it is strategically important to be ableto define design requirements that contribute to customer satisfaction when setting targets. For highly complex products such as vehicles, target setting is an evolving process based on continually changing internal and external requirements. Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is a method that provides a structured approach for incorporating customer needs into the product development process. However, in addition to product targets, product usage proficiency also contributes to customer satisfaction. Customers often do not read manuals; they learn by trying things out and sometimes the use of the product ends up outside the expected acceptable range of the designers, delivering to the customer low product performance. The intention of this article is therefore to gain a deeper understanding of the customer by analyzing customer-product interaction of customer products and integrating it into QFD to identify the most interesting design requirements to improve customer satisfaction when developing products that are comparable to the ones launched in the market. The proposed method facilitates designer awareness of target population before re-designing an existing product and it helps designers to set a starting point to improve usage proficency for each customer by providing individualized feedback.

This paper discusses creation of a support tool (SIMULINK model) for collaborative work process modelling and optimisation based on Simulation Driven Design (SDD). The purpose is to improve the studied company's ability to develop hardware-based services in an early concept stage, and to predict performance of a given service scenario before development. The approach is useful as a decision-support tool in evaluating and prioritising business offers and activities in the business offer process. The modelling and simulation approach minimises the cost of each concept and allows simulation of a number of different concepts before the actual work is carried out

A particle counter was used to detect sliding wear and pitting in a low-speed hydraulic motor. The features used by a neural network were accumulated mass, number of particles and time above threshold. The diagnostic tool was experimentally evaluated by collecting data from a test rig running under heavy-duty conditions in a laboratory.Accumulated time above a threshold value seems to be an adequate feature to detect severe damage to a low speed motor at constant operating conditions. Using a neural network to combine the three features gives earlier and more reliable detection of which wear mode is prevailing than when only using the features singly.

Purpose - The ability to build up a film thickness separating the contacts in the bearing is essential to assure long service life of rolling element bearings. Rolling element bearings used in refrigeration suffer from poor film thickness due to decreased viscosity of the lubricant by the dilution of refrigerant in the oil. The purpose of this paper is to redesign a bearing test apparatus equipped with a capacitance measuring device able to monitor the lubrication status in the bearing online and include experiments to verify the capacitance measuring technique. Design/methodology/approach - The objective is to design a complete system to study film build up in rolling element bearings in a refrigerant environment and to use and evaluate the capacitance/resistance measuring technique.Findings - The investigation shows good correlation between denting on tested bearings and the identified contacts by the capacitance measuring apparatus. The method is also useful when studying lift-off or run-in of a bearing.Originality/value - in this paper, a bearing test apparatus is redesigned and equipped with a capacitance measuring device

Chlorine free replacement refrigerants, HFC (hydrofluorocarbons) and HC (hydrocarbons), have shown less lubricating properties. Phosphate based additives were used to improve the lubricity with refrigerant R-134a, demonstrating positive effects. In the present paper, the ability to form lubricating film and wear of two additives, phosphate ester and acid phosphate, was investigated in a bearing test apparatus. The results show that phosphate additive in polyolester oil, in an R-134a environment, increases the lubricating film and reduce wear. Surface topography during the initial run-in changes to a more favorable profile with lower RMS angle and longer wavelengths that promote load-carrying capacity and film build-up.

A high-pressure chamber is used to study lubricant compressibility when refrigeration oil is diluted by refrigerant. The tested lubricant in this work is a POE (polyol ester) oil, POE diluted with nonchlorinated (HFC) refrigerant R-134a, a naphthenic mineral oil, and the mineral oil diluted with the chlorinated (HCFC) refrigerant R-22. The high-pressure chamber experiments show that by adding 20 wt% of R-134a to the polyol ester oil, the stiffness of the lubricant increases by approximately 38 wt% at 1 GPa and is much higher than for R-22 and mineral oil.

This paper is concerned with forest logging machinery. A great deal of final felling in cut-to-length method done by harvester, which fells, delimbs and cuts the trees to pre-selected lengths. Two important criteria of a harvester head are that it has to be energy efficient and it has to be as fast as possible. To minimize losses in hydraulic systems the main demand is to reduce pressure losses in high power valves and outer components as much as possible. Each orifice in the flow path results in power losses. This work is an experimental study on power losses and acceleration of hydraulic motor in a system with long hoses. Main hydraulic components included are hydraulic pump, cartridge valve, pipe line and hydraulic motor. The results show that pre-activating the pump improves the system speed. To reduce losses, optimization of valve block, cartridge valve orifices are needed. Accumulators are favourable if combined with high stand-by pressure.