D K Chaturvedi, Puneet Kumar Singh, Dayal Verma, Gaurav Kumar, N L Mahato

Abstract

Bakelite is a thermosetting plastic which is widely used in plastic product manufacturing industry. It is an excellent insulator and has high mechanical strength. The main drawback with Bakelite is that it consumes a lot of electrical energy and time for curing (baking) which results in high processing cost and low production rate. Moreover it can't be recycled, which in turn causes more financial loss if rejection occur. To keep the rejection in control, normally Bakelite product manufacturers take a little adequate time than required for its curing. The curing time (baking time) depends on temperature and pressure applied with many other factors such as quality of raw material, size, shape of component and environmental conditions. In this paper, it is tried to calculate optimal baking time for manufacturing of Bakelite Gear Shift Knob (BGSK) using Artificial Neural Network (ANN), trained through data derived from Torsion & Hardness Test of various samples produced at different time and temperature ranges with other factors keeping constant.

Keywords- Optimization, Bakelite, Thermosetting, Gear knob, Curing Time, Neural Network