Design and development of a special purpose machine for glass insertion in plastic frame for spill guard glass shelf assembly of commercial refrigerators

Refrigerator glass shelves are assembled with plastic frame and the final assembly is slid into the grooves of the refrigerators inside the plastic liner. Refrigerator manufacturers across Northern India outsource the manufacturing and assembling of refrigerator shelves to small scale industries who after manufacturing the polypropylene plastic frame from injection molding and procuring the tempered glass sheet, assemble it manually. A survey is conducted in this regard across many such small scale industries and the findings show that on manually assembling the glass sheet and plastic frame the rejection is around twenty percent and productivity is forty five seconds per component. In this paper, by analyzing the plastic frame using ANSYS 16.0, a special purpose machine (SPM) is designed and developed using Creo 2.0 and Catia V5 to accommodate the assembly operation for high production rate and zero tolerance for rejection.