Application of House of Quality Matrix to Material Selection for Engineering Designs

Aims: The paper developed a strategy that apply the house of quality (HOQ) matrix for selecting appropriate engineering materials for use in engineering designs. The HOQ matrix provides a means for translating customer needs into appropriate technical requirements for effective product planning.

Study Design: Development of strategy for material selection and comparison using HOQ Computer Assisted Materials Selection (HCAMS) Software.

Place and Duration of Study: Department of Mechanical Engineering, Federal University of Technology, Akure, Ondo State, Nigeria, between January 2014 and May 2015.

Methodology: The HOQ concept was used for determining and selecting the best material available that is suitable and which can adequately be used to manufacture a designed component. It was employed for screening and ranking of materials in a quantitative manner, within the strategy developed prior to selection. The strategy was then implemented through a software that was developed using Visual Basic programming language nested with Python. The software was developed to run on microsoft windows operating platform and to be interractive and user-friendly. It processed specific informations supplied by the users in respect of a designed product into standard requirements useful in quantitatively determining the materials that are best fitted for the manufacture of the product.

Results: Recommendation of materials best suited for the manufacturing of the designed product was provided by the material selector software developed. The software was validated and evaluated using practical examples from past engineering design work. Also, a comparison of the time it takes to finish the process of material selection using manual approach to the one when HCAMS is used revealed that the software is two hundred and three times faster.

Conclusion: Materials recommendations for design by the software in respect of the case studies are the same with the ones recommended from manually conducted material selection exercise using the developed strategy.