New design for assembly methodology adapted to large size products: Application on a solar tracker design

This paper describes a new design methodology for long life and large size (Ll-Ls) product assembly, which has been developed modifying and merging existing Design for Assembly (DfA) methodologies to adapt them to the particularities of this kind of products. These goods are often formed by different large and heavy subcomponents that need to be assembled and commissioned on field, which require the use of several people or special machinery, aspects that are not considered in traditional DfA methodologies. The new methodology, through a Lucas-Hull DfA methodology based approach, gives the chance to evaluate and enhance different design options in the design phase without the need to construct and test prototypes, which are usually quite expensive for this typology of products. An in-house tool has been created to help the designer in the evaluation of different options, where the identifications of the critical features that penalize the assembly of Ll-Ls products are easily identifiable. A case study has been carried out over a solar tracker to test the new approach where design efficiency has been optimized up to 20.4 percentage points through the advices given by the methodology. This means that the optimized design can save up to the 22.8% of the assembly cost in an standard 4.6MW plant, which usually has up to 850 solar trackers. Yet, although the results are really promising, the need to study and add logistic factors to the methodology for this kind of products has been proven, as involved high costs in the whole installation process need to be considered