NGen announces a $250K investment for end-of-line testing solution for bushing components

NGen announces $250K investment in automotive manufacturing solution

HAMILTON — NGen, the non-profit organization advancing Canada’s Advanced Manufacturing Supercluster – has announced an investment of $250,000 to support a project led by Kepstrum (Toronto, ON) and partners Stackpole (Mississauga, ON) and Armo-Tool (London, ON). The consortium will build an advanced end-of-line tester for Stackpole’s bushing components, a critical subcomponent of their hydraulic powertrain solutions.

Within the Canadian automotive manufacturing industry, manual end-of-line test-to-pass is a commonly used practice that is blind to manufacturing processes and its day-to-day variations. As a result, manufacturers are experiencing a heightened level of recalls due to unidentified product failures during production. Furthermore, automotive manufacturing companies are having to develop new components without the historical iterations for reference due to the rapid speed of change in vehicle electrification.

The pilot system will utilize the analytical algorithms, developed in the prior feasibility study, in order to correlate the gap-to-failure of parts that passed the end-of-line production test system to variation in material properties and critical manufacturing parameters in the manufacturing process. The pilot system will also be able to perform design limit tests as an end-of-line batch testing. This new and advanced multi-functional end-of-line tester is an industry-first that can detect compound production deficiencies which are not detected by current uncorrelated and parallel production quality control processes.

“NGen’s mission is to enable collaboration to build world leading advanced manufacturing capabilities in Canada,” said Jayson Myers, CEO, NGen. “This partnership between Kepstrum, Stackpole and Armo-Tool is a great example of how we can collaborate to deploy cutting edge innovations that benefit all partners and scale new technologies in real-world manufacturing environments.”

This project is funded by NGen under Canada’s Innovation Supercluster Initiative.