3D Concrete Printer Assembly Factory Development

Overview

X-Hab 3D currently operates out of a 10,000 square foot high-bay, open floorplan facility in State College, PA that accommodates the small company’s current needs, but the site needs development to enable the company’s growth goals.

Objectives

The student team has been tasked with developing a floor plan for the factory that achieves efficiency, organization, sufficient capacity, and provides the ideal workplace for all current and future employees. An important goal was for these layouts to have the proper capacity and assembly configuration to produce 2-3 finished concrete printers per week. Additionally, the facility must also include key rooms and areas for critical functions such as research and development, a static-free workspace, bathrooms, offices, and meeting rooms for employees, as well as testing/storage areas for the finished printer systems.

Approach

The team gathered facility dimensions, developed an assembly process map, and researched assembly plant layouts to formulate initial design concepts. Multiple rounds of alpha and beta prototypes were developed before reaching the final designs. Each round of prototyping was meant to solve issues from the previous round, including better allocation of space for throughput and capacity and incorporating feedback from X-Hab about select requirements. This collaboration between the student team and X-Hab resulted in two final layout designs, one incorporating the use of the facility’s mezzanine and one excluding this feature.

Outcomes

Once these two designs were finalized, the team performed flow, capacity, and throughput calculations for each design. During this stage, the team realized that a bottleneck in the system was slowing down production. A change was made to increase the finished printer testing area, allowing for two finished printers to be tested simultaneously, decreasing the wait time for testing by 8.4 hours and decreasing the 3D concrete printer TAKT time by 24.2 hours. Simulation results showed that the current maximum throughput for the facility is 1.6 3D concrete printers per week. An important thing to note is this calculation was made using their current prototype cycle times. These cycle times will decrease, allowing the company to meet their goal of 2-3 finished printers per week. The team found that the average travel distance for all large components in one unit is 2,238 feet when using the layout with the mezzanine and 2,320 feet in the layout without it. What makes these designs unique is that, as X-Hab 3D grows, there are easy options for expansion, such as utilizing the mezzanine and including modular offices on the ground floor, which would provide an extra level of office or conference space.