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Cost analysis of wire-EDMing operation was investigated in this study. Servo voltage, pulse on time, pulse off time, wire feed rate, and wire tension were varied in the experiment to define the optimal conditions for supporting wire-EDMing process. Taguchi's L27 orthogonal array was applied for designing the experiment. Machining cost, material removal rate (MRR), and surface roughness were taken into consideration as the process responses. From the experiment, increasing the servo voltage, pulse off time, and wire feed rate could reduce the surface roughness, whereas an increase in pulse on time and wire tension gave poor surface quality. Increasing servo voltage and pulse on time significantly affected the kerf width; comparing to other factors, they caused insignificant changes in the kerf width. Additionally, the correlation between machining cost and machining performance was analyzed and discussed in this study.

The aim of the article is to predict and recommend the guidelines for designing and selecting the new trend of product to meet customer requirements. Kansei engineering (KE) and factor analysis are applied as the tools for evaluating and translating customer feelings to physical design components. In order to demonstrate the proposed concepts, a vision correction eyewear for a round-faced customer has been used as the design case study. Trendy eyewear design is inspired by young people in urban areas; therefore, Bangkok metropolitan has been selected as the target area for launching surveys to observe customer perceptions. After applying KE and factor analysis on the interviewed data, the recommended sets of product characteristics are extracted and formed as the drafted designs that might satisfy the customer requirements. Moreover, using the proposed approach may help shop owners and manufacturers to offer the right products to the customers at the right time where the occurrence of overstocking or understocking situations may be reduced.

Asia-Pacific Journal of Science and Technology, 25, 1, 1-11

Packaging is one of the main considerations that drives and support good transportation system. In beverage transportation, the package has to be designed to safely contain the product while allowing for high transporting capacity. This research applied the concept of Finite Element Analysis (FEA) to analyze and improve an existing design of beer bottle crate. A packaging beer crate of beer Lao has been chosen as a case study. Static loading in different scenarios such as stacking and lifting were investigated with FEA. The result shows that the improved design can increase the number of bottles per crate by 8% while keeping the same dimensional size. A novel insert design was also introduced to help absorbing shocks and vibration during the transport.

This paper presents a study on intermodal transportation network design problem. The problem is to minimize the total of fixed facility location cost, the transportation cost, the transfer cost, the emission cost, while at the same time, satisfies customer demand, the flow conservation over different transportation mode, the terminal capacity, the vehicle minimum utilization, and the percentage circuitry constraints. The mixed-integer programming model is developed and analyzed with data from the south of Vietnam. The transportation mode of consideration is truck and inland waterway. Results indicate that the intermodal transportation model can reduce the total cost significantly when compared to the unimodal model.

The interviewed 150 ladies from the central provinces of Thailand prefer to wear flat shoes for performing daily activities. A 54% of the interviewed group prefers to apply heel insoles for releasing stress occurred during the day; especially the ladies who are members of an aircrew or a flight attendant. Some insoles or heel inserts are available in the market without clear product instructions or descriptions, only the trained brand ambassadors have introduced and suggested the specific characteristics of their products. Cost of inserts is depended upon the reliability, the brand designers or the materials of the product. Providing product description clearly on the package can help the customers avoid any confusion and eliminate issue about having trouble getting comfortable when they are wearing shoes with inserts. Applying the technical applications proposed in this research can help to select the appropriate insoles with a reasonable price for minimizing foot pain or extending the walking period tolerance of daily activities where the same or favorite shoes still be applied.

It is quite difficult to quickly design the special inserts or shoes for the particular patient who faces the problem about foot’s shape. Well-mould designing can make the geometric shapes of the inserts to be properly fitted to the feet, as the results, the pains can be relieved where the patient can perform the daily activities with more comfortable. To quickly copy near-net shape of the virtual model from the master part, the integrating between reverse engineering and slush casting has been applied where the Automated Selective Acquisition System (ASAS) has been applied in this research as the alternative reflective-scanning method to obtain an organized data set without applying any data reduction processes. For assisting the ASAS technique to quickly acquire the non-rigid part as feet, generating the solid feet by slush casting technique has been firstly performed where the various materials have been studied under the criteria of economical-based impression and non-skin allergic problems.

Selective data acquisition has been introduced recently for direct interfacing reverse engineering (RE) with rapid prototyping (RP). Data are acquired selectively and locally layer by layer according to the analysis of an image processing algorithm that has been developed for recommending the scanning positions from the edge images of the object. The recommendations, however, depend on the quality of the input images and the edge detection parameters. An attempt to make selective data acquisition more robust and less sensitive to the aforementioned factors is therefore presented in this paper. A structured light system (SLS) and projective transformation have been integrated into this SLS-based selective data acquisition to induce features on an object surface to appear explicitly through phase distortion of a projected bright line, and to diminish perspective distortion effects in the analysis through transformation of deformed bright lines on side views to be contour segments on top view. The implementation of this new selective data acquisition approach is also presented and discussed.

Reverse engineering (RE) has been used closely with rapid prototyping (RP) for fabricating one object from another. Existing RE–RP integrations all begin with the data acquisition of the entire surface of an object. This large point cloud data contains redundancy that must be reduced to avoid unnecessary difficulty in a subsequent surface reconstruction step. Presented in this paper is an alternative approach for direct RE–RP integration. Rather than performing data reduction after capturing the data of an entire object, data are acquired selectively and locally layer by layer. An image-processing algorithm has been developed for recommending the scanning positions based on the part complexity to minimise the number of scans. The result of each scan is contour data points, which can be directly used to generate commands for fabricating a prototype. The implementation of this selective data acquisition approach with a non-contact measuring device is also presented and discussed.

Build time and accuracy are two contradicting issues that have been a major concern in rapid prototyping, and have led to the development of many slicing approaches including those applying adaptive slicing, direct slicing, and adaptive direct slicing concepts. Presented in this paper is an approach for adaptive direct slicing that applies image processing technique to determine appropriate thickness for each sliced layer and to recommend slicing positions on a 3D CAD model. Two orthogonal views of a model are captured and converted to be edge images before being analyzed, and based on the surface complexity on the two edge images, slicing positions are recommended. These positions are passed to the CAD software for slicing activities. This adaptive direct slicing approach has been implemented on LabVIEW platform and compared with uniform direct slicing approach and uniform cusp height approach. The results show that this slicing approach improved slicing performance by reducing the number of layer which has a direct impact on build time while maintaining surface quality at the same level as the thin uniform direct slicing. Since its inputs are the images of a CAD model instead of the model itself, this adaptive direct slicing supports any CAD software.

In agricultural field, irrigation is one of the most interesting considerations affecting the rate of plant growth and development. Micro-irrigation as the dripping or sprinkle method is one of the irrigation types that applies the small amount of water for fulfilling the humidity requirement. The most important factors affecting the demand of water for plants are soil conditions and effect of climatic factors. With less human labour required, to improve the irrigation method from the recent days, analyzing water used or water permeation automatically through the soil moisture has been raised as the interesting topic. Proposed in this research is the ring irrigation system (RIS) which is introduced as an alternative channel for emitters that drip water directly onto the soil at the plant’s root zone where the soil conditions before and after watering can be quickly detected by the sensors. This RIS can be used for the potted plant, green house, or other small farm fields. Product design and development (PDD) is applied in this research for assisting the designer to understand and create the RIS prototype properly according to the customer’s requirements where the suggested functions obtained will be added and tested.

To support design process for launching the product on time, reverse engineering (RE) process has been introduced for quickly generating 3D CAD model from its physical object. The accuracy of the 3D CAD model depends upon the data acquisition technique selected, contact or non-contact methods. In order to reduce times used for acquiring surface and eliminating noises, the automated selective acquisition system has been developed and presented in this research as the alternative channel for non-contact acquisition technique where the data is selectively and locally scanned contour by contour without performing data reduction process. The results present as the organized contour points which are directly used to generate 3D virtual model. The comparison between the proposed technique and another non-contact scanning technique has been presented and discussed.

In order to reduce the transportation time and cost for direct interface between customer and manufacturer, the image processing technique has been introduced in this research where designing part and defining manufacturing process can be performed quickly. A3D virtual model is directly generated from a series of multi-view images of an object, and it can be modified, analyzed, and improved the structure, or function for the further implementations, such as computer-aided manufacturing (CAM). To estimate and quote the production cost, the user-friendly platform has been developed in this research where the appropriate manufacturing parameters and process detections have been identified and planned by CAM simulation., {"references":["M. Pollefeys, R. Koch, M. Vergauwen and L. V. Gool, \"Automated reconstruction of 3D scenes from sequences of images\", ISPRS Journal of Photogrammatry & Remote Sensing, Vol. 55, 2000, pp. 251-267.","G. Zeng, M. Lhuillier and L. Quan, \"Recent Methods for Reconstructing Surfaces from Multiple Image\", IWMM-GIAE, LNCS3519, 2005, pp. 429-447.","S. Rianmora, P. Koomsap and V. H. Dang Phi, \"Selective data acquisition for direct integration of reverse engineering and rapid prototyping\", Virtual and Physical Prototyping, Vol. 4, 2009, pp. 227-239.","S. Rianmora and P. Koomsap, \"Recommended Slicing Positions for Adaptive Direct Slicing by Image Processing Technique\", International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology, Vol. 46, 2009, pp. 1021-1033.","S. Rianmora and P. Koomsap, \"Structured light system-based selective data acquisition\", Journal of Robotics and Computer-integrated Manufacturing, Vol. 27, 2011, pp. 870-880.","M. Heijltje and A. V. Witteloostuijn, \"Configurations of market environments, competitive strategies, manufacturing technologies and human resource management policies\", Journal of Management and Technology Vol. 19, 2003, pp. 31–62.","Q. Zhang, Mark, A. Vonderembse and M. Cao, \"Product concept and prototype flexibility in manufacturing: Implications for customer satisfaction\", European Journal of Operational Research, Vol.194, 2009, pp.143–154.","Q. Zhang, Mark A. Vonderembse and J. Limc, \"Manufacturing flexibility: defining and analyzing relationships among competence, capability, and customer satisfaction\", Journal of Operations Management Vol. 21, 2003, pp. 173–191.","S. D. El Wakil, \"Processes and Design for Manufacturing\", 2nd edition, PWS Publishing Company, 1998. \n[10]\tH. S. Alhichri and M. Kamel, \"Virtual circles: a new set of features for fast image registration\", Pattern Recognition Letters, Vol. 24, 2003, pp. 1181-1190.\n[11]\tP. Markeil, D. Tomaevic, B. Likar and F. Pernus, \"A review of 3D/2D registration methods for image-guided intervention\", Medical Image Analysis, Vol. 16, 2012, pp. 642-661.\n[12]\tA. H. Ahmadabadian, S. Robson, J. Boehm, M. Shortis, K. Wenzel and D. Fritsch, \"A comparison of dense matching algorithms for scaled surface reconstruction\", Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, 2013, Vol. 78, pp. 157-167.\n[13]\tA. Koutsoudis, B. Vidmar and F. Arnaou, \"Performance evaluation of a multi-image 3D reconstruction software on a low-feature artefact\", Journal of Archaeological Science, Vol. 40, pp. 4450-4456.\n[14]\tK. Hanke and M. A. Ebrahim, \"The Digital Projector Raytracing as a tool for digital close-range photogrammetry\", Journal of Photogrammetry & Remote Sensing, Vol. 54, 1999, pp.35-40.\n[15]\tB. Zitova and J. Flusser, \"Image registration method: a survay\", Image and vision Computing, Vol.21, 2003, pp. 977-1000.\n[16]\tEmmanuel P. Baltsavias, \"A comparison between photogrammetry and laser scanning\", ISPR Journal of Photogrammetry & Remote Sensing, Vol. 54, 1999, pp. 83-94.\n[17]\tW. Cao and Y. Miyamoto, \"Direct slicing from AutoCAD solid models for rapid prototyping\", International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing, Vol. 21, 2003, pp.739-742."]}

G-code is the main factor in computer numerical control (CNC) machine for controlling the toolpaths and generating the profile of the object’s features. For obtaining high surface accuracy of the surface finish, non-stop operation is required for CNC machine. Recently, to design a new product, the strategy that concerns about a change that has low impact on business and does not consume lot of resources has been introduced. Cost and time for designing minor changes can be reduced since the traditional geometric details of the existing models are applied. In order to support this strategy as the alternative channel for machining operation, this research proposes the automatic generating codes for CNC milling operation. Using this technique can assist the manufacturer to easily change the size and the geometric shape of the product during the operation where the time spent for setting up or processing the machine are reduced. The algorithm implemented on MATLAB platform is developed by analyzing and evaluating the geometric information of the part. Codes are created rapidly to control the operations of the machine. Comparing to the codes obtained from CAM, this developed algorithm can shortly generate and simulate the cutting profile of the part.

Feet and ankles are parts of human body that receive high-pressure in every day. Feet disorders such as ankle sprain, achilles tendonitis, heel pain, and plantar fasciitis are very common. There are many causes for these feet disorders such as wearing high heels, obesity, sports activity, and standing for a long time. There are many reliefs for feet disorders such as heel insert. However, they come in various shapes and use different materials. There are no specifications in which type is suitable for specific user. This has led to the proposed research to provide guidelines for selecting the appropriate heel insert for ladies who face with long-standing carriers. This research uses contact-measuring techniques to test forces, contact area, and pressure acting on a person’s feet in various standing positions with different insert materials and shapes. The proper material for making insert will be presented and discussed., {"references":["University of Maryland Medical Center (UMMC), \"Foot pain – Introduction\", online http://www.umm.edu/patiented/articles/ what_foot_pain_000061_1.htm, 2011.","K. Brücknera, S. Odenwalda, S. Schwanitza, J. Heidenfelderb, and T. Milanib, \"Polyurethane-foam midsoles in running shoes - impact energy and damping\". The journal of procedia engineering, vol. 2, issue 2, 2010, pp. 2789-2793.","American College of Foot and Ankle Surgeons (ACFAS), \"Ankle Sprain\", online http://www.foothealthfacts.org/footankleinfo/ankle-sprain.htm, 2009.","B. D. Den Hartog \"Insertional achilles tendinosis: pathogenesis and treatment\", Foot and ankle clinics, vol. 14, issue 4, 2009, pp. 639-650.","C. T. Hu, and A.S. Flemister, \"Insertional achilles tendinopathy: surgical options\", Operative techniques in Orthopaedics, vol. 18, issue 4, 2008, pp. 247-253.","A. McMillan, and C. Payne, \"Immediate effect of foot orthoses on plantar force timing during running: A repeated measures study\", The foot, vol. 21, issue 1, 2011, pp. 26-30.","F. Benazzo, A. Todesca, and L. Ceciliani, \"Achilles' tendon tendinitis and heel pain\", Operative techniques in sports medicine, vol. 5, issue 3, 1997, pp. 179-188.","D. R. Bonanno, K.B. Landorf, and H.B. Menz, \"Pressure-relieving properties of various shoe inserts in older people with plantar heel pain\", Gait and posture, vol. 33, issue 3, 2011, pp. 385-389.","G. Lichtwark, and A. Wilson, \"In vivo mechanical properties of the human Achilles tendon during one-legged hopping\", The Journal of Experimental Biology, vol. 208, 2005, pp. 4715-4725.\n[10]\tA.K. Ramanathan, M.C. John, G.P. Arnold, L. Cochrane, and R.J. Abboud, \"The effects of off-the-shelf in-shoe heel inserts on forefoot plantar pressure\", Gait and posture, vol. 28, issue 4, 2008, pp. 533-537.\n[11]\tL. Yung-Hui and W. Hsien, \"The effects of off-the-shelf in-shoe heel inserts on forefoot plantar pressure\", Applied Ergonomics, vol. 36, issue 3, 2005, pp. 355-362.\n[12]\tDrug information online, \"Heel Pain\", online http://www.drugs.com/ health-guide/heel-pain.html.\n[13]\t\"The effects of off-the-shelf in-shoe heel inserts on forefoot plantar pressure\".\n[14]\tW.P. Chen, C.W. Ju and F.T. Tang, \"Effect of total contact insoles on the plantar stress redistribution: a finite element analysis\", Clinical Biomechanics, Elsevier, vol. 18, 2003, pp. S17-S24.\n[15]\tJen, \"Honey Kennedy\", online http://www.honeykennedy.com/2013/03/.\n[16]\tN. J. Mills, C. Fitzgerald, A. Gilchrist, and R. Verdejo, \"Polymer foams for personal protection: cushions, shoes and helmets\", Composites Science and Technology, vol. 63, 2003, pp. 2389–2400.\n[17]\tD. G. Dikobe and A. S. Luyt, \"Morphology and properties of polypropylene/ethylene vinyl acetate copolymer/wood powder blend composites\", Express Polymer Letters, Vol.3, No.3, 2009, 190–199.\n[18]\tR Verdejo, and N. J. Mills, \"Heel–shoe interactions and the durability of EVA foam running-shoe midsoles\". The journal of biomechanics, vol. 37, Issue 9, 2004, pp. 1379-1386."]}

The concept of structured light system has been applied to recommend scanning positions in selective data acquisition process. The complexity is analyzed from the edge images of a single horizontal line of bright light that is projected locally onto the surface on different side views. Each analysis leads to a recommendation for either scanning position or projecting a new line position. However, an inherent error from mapping 3D object onto 2D image may have negative influence on the decision making. This paper, therefore, presents an attempt to deduce 3D geometric information from edge image by applying 2D projective transformations. On each different side views, the two consecutive projected lines on the horizontal plane are used to analyze the layer's complexity.

Selective data acquisition has been researched recently as an alternative for direct interface reverse engineering (RE) with rapid prototyping (RP). Rather than performing data reduction after capturing data of an entire object, data are acquired selectively and locally layer by layer according to the analysis from the image of the object. The result of each scan is contour data points, which can be directly used to generate commands for fabricating a prototype. The concept of fringe projection is presented in this paper as a tool for recommending scanning position in selective data acquisition. A single band of bright light is projected horizontally onto the object and the image of the projected band is captured and analyzed instead of the image of the object. The study shows promising results that encourage further investigation such that adaptive reverse engineering system for direct interface with rapid prototyping (RP) can be improved.