QUALITY MANAGEMENT

Quality Management

Quality Management

Introduction

Quality management principles remain important for business as well as technology sectors. Efficiently designed quality management process is one of the most important requirements of any type of any organizations today (Rose, 2004). To meet the challenges of competitive world, the organizations include quality assurance and quality management departments, which are responsible for determining the quality level of the company's products.

Classified weapon platforms often utilize Pave VIPER. Pave VIPER is a complex system of extremely efficient sensors, as these sensors provide the facilities of night terrain to the aircrafts. Due to the nature of VIPER's job, quality and safety management becomes critical. This paper analyzes the case study “Laser Optics Debonding” (Berk and Berk, 2000, pp. 193), which deals with the failure of equipment due to debonding. The paper also includes suggestions for improving the process of quality management.

Operation of VIPER

The VIPER equipment operates both as the Laser and transmitter. The equipment operates at the wavelength of 1.5 micros, which is considered as the standard tactical wavelength. Also, the system operates at the wavelength of 1.6 microns, which is considered as eye safe wavelength. The number of optical components significantly increases in the VIPER as compared to the traditional equipments, due to the fact that VIPER Pays extra attention on eye safety.

Manufacturing VIPER

To manufacture VIPER laser/transmitter equipment is a risky and critical process. This section discusses some of the major elements of the VIPER manufacturing and analyses each process from the perspective of quality management.

First of all, the optical components such as prisms, lenses and other laser/energy focusing equipments are mounted on the titanium mounts. In order to mount the equipments to titanium mounts, a two part epoxy is used. When the epoxy medium becomes ready for use, the epoxy agents are mixed together. Once these agents are mixed, the epoxy is then carefully applied to the joints of the optical components and the mounts. Although, the components are attached by taking extreme care, it is necessary to ensure the quality of the mounts by analyzing the conditions of joints. The first step of the quality management for this procedure would be to determine that whether or not the right quantity of epoxy is being used; this decision is important because if too little epoxy would be used, the bond between the optical component and titanium mount would be too loose to hold the component. On the other hand, if too much epoxy would be applied, it would either distort the laser beam path by spilling into the optical path.

After mounting, the next important process is to fix all the components at accurate angles, in order to make the laser light focused at the correct points. In order to let the mounts and optical components fix with each other properly, adjustment procedure is stared at least 24 hours after applying epoxy. Optical bench and Helium Neon laser are used for adjusting the laser beam, tightly within the specified tolerance ...