This paper presents a costing methodology which allows the Life Cycle Cost of electric motors to be assessed. The electric motor manufacturing processes and use scenarios have been analyzed in order to formalize the rules for the LCC evaluation. The approach has been implemented in a software tool, which is a module of a more complex platform developed to support engineers in designing more efficient, economic and eco-sustainable electric motors. In particular, the possibility to assess the manufacturing costs during the configuration phase allows solutions which are unfeasible from an economic point of view to be discarded immediately, avoiding modifications of the new product during the production phase. Furthermore, the integration of the Cost Estimation tool in the EROD configuration platform enables the design of electric motors which are optimized in terms of costs and eco-sustainability. As a result the development time and, consequentially, the time to market as well as the final product costs will certainly decrease. The results obtained during the experimentation phase confirmed the validity and the robustness of the approach and of the developed software tool Future developments have to be focused on the improvement of the costing algorithms to calculate the cost during the manufacturing and use phase. Firstly, specific operations (i.e. assembling) have to deepen detailed, and, secondly, other use phase cost items (i.e. maintenance) have to be analyzed in order to reduce the uncertainty of the cost estimation. There is also the necessity to extend the cost estimation module in order to cover other common electric motor types, such as asynchronous three-phase or brushless PM motors. Since the proposed cost estimation tool is specific for electric motors, integration with a general purpose cost estimation tool could be implemented. In this scenario, the tool presented in this paper will represent a module of a wider LCC tool estimator.
Tool for Life Cycle Costing of Electric Motors during the Early Design Phases
2013
6 Seiten, Bilder, 19 Quellen
Conference paper
English
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