Making things has been an essential activity of human

civilizations since before recorded history. Today, the term

manufacturing is used for this activity.

Technology can be defined as the application of science to provide society

and its members with those things that are needed or desired. Technology
affects our daily lives, directly and indirectly, in many ways.
Consider the list of products in Table:
They represent various technologies that help our society and its members to live better.
What do all these products have in common? They are all manufactured. These
technological wonders would not be available to our society if they could not be
manufactured. Manufacturing is the critical factor that makes technology possible.

In the modern global economy, a nation must have a strong manufacturing base (or it must
have signifi cant natural resources) if it is to provide a strong economy and a high standard of
living for its people.

Economically, manufacturing is an important means by which a nation creates material

wealth. In the United States, the manufacturing industries account for only about 12% of
gross domestic product (GDP).
What Is Manufacturing?
The word manufacture is derived from two Latin words, manus (hand) and
factus (make); the combination means made by hand. The English word
manufacture is several centuries old, and “made by hand” accurately described
the manual methods used when the word was first coined.1 Most modern
manufacturing is accomplished by automated and computer-controlled
machinery
MANUFACTURING DEFINED
As a field of study in the modern context, manufacturing can be defined two ways, one
technologic, and the other economic. Technologically, manufacturing is the application of
physical and chemical processes to alter the geometry, properties, and/ or appearance of a
given starting material to make parts or products; manufacturing also includes assembly of
multiple parts to make products. The processes to accomplish manufacturing involve a
combination of machinery, tools, power, and labor. Manufacturing is almost always carried
out as a sequence of operations. Each operation brings the material closer to the desired
final state.
Economically, manufacturing is the transformation of materials into items of greater value
by means of one or more processing and/or assembly operations. The key point is that
manufacturing adds value to the material by changing its shape or properties, or by
combining it with other materials that have been similarly altered. The material has been
made more valuable through the manufacturing operations performed on it. When iron ore
is converted into steel, value is added. When sand is transformed into glass, value is added.
When petroleum is refined into plastic, value is added. And when plastic is molded into the
complex geometry of a patio chair, it is made even more valuable.
MANUFACTURING INDUSTRIES AND PRODUCTS
Manufacturing Processes
A manufacturing process is a designed procedure that results in physical and/or chemical
changes to a starting work material with the intention of increasing the value of that material.
A manufacturing process is usually carried out as a unit operation, which means that it is a
single step in the sequence of steps required to transform the starting material into a final
product. Manufacturing operations can be divided into two basic types: (1) processing
operations and (2) assembly operations.
A processing operation transforms a work material from one state of completion to a more
advanced state that is closer to the final desired product. It adds value by changing the
geometry, properties, or appearance of the starting material. In general, processing operations
are performed on discrete work parts, but certain processing operations are also applicable to
assembled items (e.g., painting a spot-welded car body). An assembly operation joins two or
more components to create a new entity, called an assembly, subassembly, or some other term
that refers to the joining process (e.g., a welded assembly is called a weldment)
Classification of manufacturing processes.
Material removal processes are operations that remove excess material from
the starting workpiece so that the resulting shape is the desired geometry. The
most important processes in this category are machining operations such as
turning, drilling, and milling, shown in Figure. These cutting operations are
most commonly applied to solid metals, performed using cutting tools that are
harder and stronger than the work metal.
Grinding is another common material removal process. Other processes in this
category are known as nontraditional processes because they use lasers,
electron beams, chemical erosion, electric discharges, and electrochemical
energy to remove material rather than cutting or grinding tools.
It is desirable to minimize waste and scrap in converting a starting work part into
its subsequent geometry. Certain shaping processes are more efficient than others
in terms of material conservation. Material removal processes (e.g., machining)
tend to be wasteful of material, simply by the way they work. The material
removed from the starting shape is waste, at least in terms of the unit operation.
Other processes, such as certain casting and molding operations, often convert
close to 100% of the starting material into final product. Manufacturing
processes that transform nearly all of the starting material into product and
require no subsequent machining to achieve final part geometry are called net
shape processes. Other processes require minimum machining to produce the
final shape and are called near net shape processes.
While metal cutting is commonly associated with big industries (automotive, aerospace, home
appliance, etc.) that manufacture big products, the machining of metals and alloys plays a
crucial role in a range of manufacturing activities, including the ultraprecision machining of
extremely delicate components.
 A SHORT HISTORY OF MACHINING

Before the middle of the 18th century, wood was the main material used in
engineering structures. To shape wooden parts, craftsmen used machine tools - the
lathe among them – which were typically constructed of wood as well.

The boring of cannons and the production of metal screws and small instrument
parts were the exceptions: these processes required metal tools.

It was the steam engine, with its large metal cylinders and other parts of
unprecedented dimensional accuracy, which led to the first major developments in
metal cutting in the 1760s.
The materials which constituted the first steam engines were not very difficult to
machine. Gray cast iron, wrought iron, brass and bronze were readily cut using
hardened carbon steel tools.

The methods of heat treatment of tool steel had been evolved by centuries of
craftsmen, and reasonably reliable tools were available, although rapid failure of
the tools could be avoided only by cutting very slowly. It required 27.5 working
days to bore and face one of Watt’s large cylinders.
At the inception of the steam engine, no machine tool industry existed. The
century from 1760 to 1860 saw the establishment of enterprises devoted to the
production of machine tools.
Maudslay, Whitworth, and Eli Whitney, among many other great engineers,
generated, in metallic components, the cylindrical and flat surfaces, threads,
grooves, slots and holes of the many shapes required by developing industries.

The lathe, planer, shaper, milling machine, drilling machine and power saws all
developed into rigid machines capable, in the hands of good craftspeople, of
turning out large numbers of very accurate parts that had never before been
possible.
By 1860 the basic problem of how to produce the necessary shapes in the
existing materials had been solved.

There had been little change in the materials which had to be machined – cast
iron, wrought iron and a few copper based alloys.

High carbon tool steel, hardened and tempered by the blacksmith, still had to
answer all the tooling requirements.
The quality and the consistency of tool steels had been greatly improved by a
century of experience. Yet even the best carbon steel tools, pushed to their
functional limits, were increasingly insufficient for manufacturers’ needs,
constraining production speed and hampering efficiency.
From the mid-1880s on, innovative energies in manufacturing shifted from
developing basic machine tools and producing highly-accurate parts to
reducing machining costs and cutting new types of metals and alloys.

With the Bessemer and Open Hearth steel making processes, steel rapidly
replaced wrought iron as the workhorse of construction materials. Industry
required ever greater tonnages of steel (steel production soon vastly exceeded
the earlier output of wrought iron), and required it machined to particular
specifications.
Alloy steels proved much more difficult than wrought iron to machine, and
cutting speeds had to be lowered even further to maintain reasonable tool life.

Towards the end of the 19th century, both the labor and capital costs of
machining were becoming very great. The incentive to reduce costs by
accelerating and automating the cutting process became more intense, and, up
to the present time, still acts as the major driving force behind technological
developments in the metal cutting field.
The discovery and manipulation of new cutting tool materials has been perhaps the
most important theme in the last century of metal cutting.

Productivity could not have significantly increased without the higher cutting
speeds achievable using high-speed steel and cemented carbide tools, both
important advances over traditional carbon steel technology. The next major step
occurred with the development of ceramic and ultra-hard tool materials.

Recently, a group of new techniques, including electrical discharge and water-jet

machining, have joined ceramic and ultra-hard materials at the forefront of metal
cutting technology.
Machine tool manufacturers have created machines capable of maximizing
the utility of each generation of cutting tool materials. Designers and
machinists have optimized the shapes of tools to lengthen tool life at high
cutting speeds, while lubricant manufacturers have developed new coolants
and lubricants to improve surface finish and permit increased rates of metal
removal.
Tool control has also advanced considerably since the days of manually
operated machines. Automatic machines, computer numerically controlled
(CNC) machines and transfer machines produce better tool efficiency, greatly
increasing output per employee.
Increasingly, the process of metal cutting is integrated with computer software
and hardware that control machine tools. The age of “mechatronics”
accompanies a trend toward integrated manufacturing systems composed of
cells and modules of machines rather than individual, standalone units.

Machining today requires a wider range of skills than it did a century ago:
computer programming and knowledge of electronic equipment, among others.
Nevertheless, knowledge of the physical realities of the tool-work interface is
as important as ever.
One last note should be added to our understanding of the evolution of machine tool
technology concerning the double role of basic metal producers. Many new alloys have
been developed to meet the increasingly severe conditions of stress, temperature and
corrosion imposed by the needs of our industrial civilization. Some of these materials,
like aluminum and magnesium, are easy to machine, but others, such as high-alloy
steels and nickel-based alloys, become more difficult to cut as their useful properties
(i.e. strength, durability, etc.) improve.

The machine tool and cutting tool industries have had to develop new strategies to cope
with these new metals. At the same time, basic metal producers have responded to the
demands of production engineers for metals which can be cut faster. New heat
treatments have been devised, and the introduction of alloys like free-machining steel
and brass has made great savings in production costs.
The material removal processes are a family of shaping
operations in which excess material is removed from a starting
work part so that what remains is the desired final geometry.
The “family tree” is shown in Figure:
Classification of material removal processes
Machining is a manufacturing process in which a sharp cutting tool is used to cut away
material to leave the desired part shape. The predominant cutting action in machining involves
shear deformation of the work material to form a chip; as the chip is removed, a new surface is
exposed. Machining is most frequently applied to shape metals.

(a) A cross-sectional view of the machining process. (b) Tool with negative rake angle; compare
with positive rake angle in (a)