Failure mode and effects analysis of suction hose manufacturing industry: a case study of automobiles

Human comfort and safety are the most important criterion in the manufacturing of an automobile, for this reason, every manufacturing industry assures the reliability and quality of components utilized in the automobile industry. Air Conditioner (A/C) is an essential part of an automobile that significantly contributes to human comfort and safety. It is essential to remove the failures in the manufacturing of A/C to enhance quality and reliability. In this research, a fuzzy failure mode and effects analysis (Fuzzy-FMEA) technique has been established to analyze and eradicate the risks of 16 possible failures in suction hose manufacturing of automobile A/C. It starts from defining, categorizing, and evaluating all risk failures and then ranking them by assigning fuzzy linguistic variables by the team of experts. To validate the proposed technique, the air conditioner suction hose manufacturing process for automobiles is considered as a case study. The highest value of RPN was obtained for the multiple failure modes F1 (Fluxing on the outer surface of the flange), F2 (Coating having dust particles), F6 (Weak Sleeve locking), and F7 (hard locking and clamping dies) using conventional FMEA technique. The highest values of RPN were obtained for the potential failure modes F5 (coating length less than standard), F1, and F3 using Fussy-FMEA. The results show that this Fuzzy-FMEA technique is effective and reasonable to control quality and enhance productivity and reliability.