Application of PFMEA for Identification of Self-Recovering Failures in Production Lines for Automatic Assembly of Capacitors

Quality control is an important part of the capacitors automatic assembly process. Traditionally this control is being realized through a series of electrical measurements including capacity, tension, and tgα. In most cases, these measurements are not suitable for detecting defects that appear as a result of failures of certain elements of the assembly lines. These so called self-recovering failures very often remain unnoticed, because they do not cause a suspension of the assembly process and if not taken into consideration, they can seriously menace the final product quality. In this paper, the authors use PFMEA to identify and evaluate the risk of the self-recovering failures. They also propose a simple Simulink model, which could be useful when trying to estimate the effect of installing new control devices at an existing assembly line upon its overall reliability and productivity.