Abstract:
The house of quality matrix (HOQ) provides the means for translating customer needs into appropriate technical requirements for effective product planning. It aids in determining whether a product meet customers’ demand. Hence, it can be used in solving the complex problem of material selection during product development. This research developed a strategy that apply HOQ for selecting appropriate engineering materials for use in engineering designs. HOQ concept was used for determining and selecting the best material available that can adequately be used to manufacture a designed component. The House of quality matrix was employed for screening and ranking of materials within the strategy being developed, in a quantitative manner 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 user specific informations into standard requirements useful in quantitatively determining the materials that are best fitted for the manufacture of a designed product. The results of the HOQ table are the top five materials with the capabilities to perform the job required. Recommendation of materials best suited for the job was provided by the material selector software that was developed. The software was validated and evaluated using previous engineering design works. Result of validation shows that the materials recommendation for design by the software in respect of the case studies is in agreement with the ones recommended from manually conducted material selection exercise. Also, evaluation shows that the productivity of the developed software is two hundred and three times faster than the manual selection approach. The software is applicable to material selection.
