Mechanization and Automation

What is mechanization?

• Mechanization means something is done or operated by machinery and not by hand. Mechanization of the manufacturing means is the milestone-oriented trend toward minimizing human efforts to the extent of its possibility, by adopting mechanical and electrical means or methods for automating the different manufacturing processes.
• Such a trend may be in the area of automating and mechanizing the processes of material handling, loading, and unloading of components, actual operations performed on the job or transportation, etc. But, no feedback is provided by the process, operation, or machinery.

• The automatic control may be applied for some operations or for all the operations of a machine or group of machines.
• Accordingly, the machine will be known as semi-automatic or fully automatic.
• The term was identified shortly after World War II at the Ford Motor Company to describe the automatic handling of materials and parts between the process operations.
• The word ‘automation’ is derived from the Greek word automatons meaning self-acting.

What is automation?

• Automation can also be defined as the process of following a predetermined sequence of operations with little or no human intervention, using specialized equipment and devices that perform and control the manufacturing process.
• Automation is a word that has many meanings in the industry today. Automatic machines of all kinds existed long before the term automation was conceived.
• But, it should be noted that all automatic machines do not come under the category of automation.
• Automation is a technology concerned with the application of mechanical, electronic, and computer-based systems to operate and control production.
• Every machine should involve some automation, maybe to a lesser degree or to a higher extent to which is mainly governed by economic considerations.
• Automation means a system in which many or all of the processes in the production, movement, and inspection of parts and material are performed under control by the self-operating devices called controllers.
• This implies that the essential elements of automation comprise of mechanization, sensing, feedback, and control devices.

The reasons why one should go for automation are:

Automation can be classified into three categories, viz.

(A) Fixed Automation

• It is also known as hard automation which is utilized to produce a standardized product such as gears, nuts, and bolts, etc. Even though the operating conditions can be changed, fixed automation is used for very large quantity production of one or few marginally different components.
• Highly specialized tools, devices, equipment, special purpose machine tools, are utilized to produce a product or a component of a product very efficiently and at high production rates with as low unit costs as possible relative to other alternative methods of manufacturing.

(B) Programmable Automation

• In programmable automation, one can change the design of the product or even change the product by changing the program.
• Such a technique is highly useful for the low quantity production of a large number of different components.
• The equipment used for the manufacturing is designed to be flexible or programmable. The production normally carried out in batches.

(C) Flexible Automation

• There is a third category possible between fixed automation and programmable automation that is called flexible automation using Computer Aided Design (CAD) and Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAD/CAM) activities.
• This is also called as flexible manufacturing system (FMS). It allows producing different products on the same equipment in any order or mix. One important example of programmable automation, in discrete manufacturing, is numerical control.
• The robot is another example of programmable automation. The robot being an integral part of FMS and Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) system can do a large number of manufacturing tasks for replacing the human labor.

Final words for mechanization and automation.