Lean Six Sigma: Research and Practice

Abstract

Gas turbines are highly complex systems with many competing and increasingly onerous requirements, for example: lower emissions, improved availability and lower running costs. This means that future designs will be driven to be lighter in weight, operate at higher and higher temperatures and speeds to reduce fuel burn, whilst at the same time maintaining acceptable life and overall performance characteristics. However, it is important to recognise that all of these requirements must also be robust (insensitive) to the effects of variation (“noise”) to which the gas turbines will be subjected throughout their lives. In order to better identify solutions to these requirements a number of new technologies are being developed in research programmes and then applied in full engine programmes. As an example of this improvement activity, Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) has been applied to the design of a specific component – a High Pressure Turbine (HPT) disc – the result of which will then provide a template for a generic robust design process going forward that can produce better designs faster. The aim of this paper is to show how DFSS was applied, using a “DCOV” methodology, to result in a quantitatively robust HPT disc design. An overview of the DCOV methodology will be given including usage of some of the key tools, such as: Quality Function Deployment (QFD), Design of Experiments, Surrogate modelling, Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), Monte Carlo simulation, Data Mining and parameter design. This will be followed by a review of the DCOV process for the HPT disc example.

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