Quality by design in the nuclear weapons complex
Modern statistical quality control has evolved beyond the point at which control charts and sampling plans are sufficient to maintain a competitive position. The work of Genichi Taguchi in the early 1970's has inspired a renewed interest in the application of statistical methods of experimental design at the beginning of the manufacturing cycle. While there has been considerable debate over the merits of some of Taguchi's statistical methods, there is increasing agreement that his emphasis on cost and variance reduction is sound. The key point is that manufacturing processes can be optimized in development before they get to production by identifying a region in the process parameter space in which the variance of the process is minimized. Therefore, for performance characteristics having a convex loss function, total product cost is minimized without substantially increasing the cost of production. Numerous examples of the use of this approach in the United States and elsewhere are available in the literature. At the Rocky Flats Plant, where there are severe constraints on the resources available for development, a systematic development strategy has been developed to make efficient use of those resources to statistically characterize critical production processes before they are introduced into production. This strategy includes the sequential application of fractional factorial and response surface designs to model the features of critical processes as functions of both process parameters and production conditions. This strategy forms the basis for a comprehensive quality improvement program that emphasizes prevention of defects throughout the product cycle. It is currently being implemented on weapons programs in development at Rocky Flats and is in the process of being applied at other production facilities in the DOE weapons complex. 63 refs.
- Research Organization:
- Rockwell International Corp., Golden, CO (USA). Rocky Flats Plant
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC04-76DP03533
- OSTI ID:
- 7254303
- Report Number(s):
- RFP-4229; CONF-8806126-1; CONF-8806126-; ON: DE88009835
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: Rocky Mountain SQC and A conference, Denver, CO, USA, 7 Jun 1988
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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Related Subjects
99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS//MATHEMATICS, COMPUTING, AND INFORMATION SCIENCE
NUCLEAR WEAPONS
QUALITY CONTROL
COST
DESIGN
EFFICIENCY
STATISTICAL MODELS
USES
CONTROL
MATHEMATICAL MODELS
WEAPONS
450202* - Explosions & Explosives- Nuclear- Weaponry- (-1989)
990230 - Mathematics & Mathematical Models- (1987-1989)