Ahmet Gökay Öztürk 030050143 (2nd week)

Benchmarking

Benchmarking is defined as the continual search for the implementation
of practices that could provide a competitive edge.* Companies differ in the
way they implement benchmarking, but it is usually adapted as a corporate
strategy used to identify the industrial leaders, promote proven techniques
and approaches, establish meaningful goals, perform business forecasting,
and analyze the overall internal process.Benchmarking can be categorized
into three major categories:

1. Internal benchmarking
2. Competitive benchmarking
3. Generic benchmarking

Internal Benchmarking: in this type of benchmarking similar activities in
various locations, departments, and units are evaluated to gain data
accessibility.

Competitive Benchmarking: This type of benchmarking is concerned with
the identification and evaluation of direct competitors to obtain data relevant
to the product under investigation and to find comparable processes in order
to gain a competitive edge.'"

Generic Benchmarking: The objective here is to evaluate the organizations
and their functions that are considered to be the industry standard in order to
achieve procedure standardization.
(Emad Abouel Nasr,Ali K. Kamrani, Computer-Based Design and Manufacturing An Information-Based Approach, pg.13)


Tool steels

Tool steels are made to meet special quality
requirements, primarily due to their use in manufacturing
processes as well as for machining metals, woods,
and plastics.Some examples are cutting tools,
dies for casting or forming, and gages for dimensional
tolerance measurements. Tool steels are very clean
ingot-cast wrought products with medium (minimum
0.35%) to high carbon content and high alloy (up to
25%) contents, making them extremely expensive.
(Grote Antonsson, Springer Handbook of Mechanical Engineering, pg.178)


High-Speed Steels

High-speed steels are usually used
for drilling, milling, broaching, sawing, and turning
tools. Their hot hardness (up to approximately 600 ◦C)
is far superior to that of tool steels Their
hardness results from their basic martensitic structure
and from interspersed carbides: tungsten carbides,
tungsten-molybdenum carbides, chromium carbides,
and vanadium carbides.
(Grote Antonsson, Springer Handbook of Mechanical Engineering, pg.628)

Dynamic Mechanical Properties

In structural applications, members are often subjected
to varying load/stress over time either in the form of vibrations
or high-energy impacts. It is important to have
an understanding of the effect of such forces on structural
integrity to avoid catastrophic failure by fracture.
(Grote Antonsson, Springer Handbook of Mechanical Engineering, pg.117)