Design and development of torque rod bushing testing system

This paper presents the design and development process of a torque rod bushing testing system which is intended to be used in Part Industry 1999 Company Limited (PMCO1999). PMCO1999 manufactures automotive parts and torque rod bushing is one of the important products of the company. The company would like to improve the quality of the torque rod bushing thus a test process for assessing the quality of the torque rod bushing is required. The company developed an in house solution for the testing problem. However, the test process is time-consuming and labor intensive. Therefore, PMCO1999 asks our research team to improve their testing machine. We developed the first version of the testing machine based on an assumption that once the crack appears on the rubber of the torque rod bushing, the elasticity of the rubber will change abruptly. However, experiment 1 in this paper demonstrates that the assumption is not valid. Therefore, we developed the second version of the testing machine by introducing two more cameras to take photographs of torque rod bushing during test. The photographs are then systematically linked with other test data and the operator can used this linked data to assess the quality of the rubber. The second version testing machine developed by us is now being used at PMCO1999. Furthermore, the company concludes that the developed testing machine reduce the time required to test a torque rod bushing by 50% when compared to the previous method used in the company. This enables PMCO1999 to continue to improve the quality of torque rod bushing produced by the company.