Benchmarking the quality improvement strategies of wire arc additive manufacturing process using fuzzy QFD approach

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to improve the productivity and quality of the wire arc additive manufacturing process by benchmarking the strategies from the selected six strategies, namely, heat treatment process, inter pass cooling process, inter pass cold rolling process, peening process, friction stir processing and oscillation process. Design/methodology/approach To overcome the lack of certainty associated with correlations and relationships in quality functional deployment, fuzzy numbers have been integrated with the quality functional deployment framework. Twenty performance measures have been identified from the literature under five groups, namely, mechanical properties, physical properties, geometrical properties, cost and material properties. Using house of quality weights are allocated to performance measures and groups, relationships are established between performance measures and strategies, and correlations are assigned between strategies. Finally, for each strategy, relative importance, score and crisp values are calculated. Findings Inter pass cold rolling process strategy is computed with the highest crisp value of 15.80 which is followed by peening process, heat treatment process, friction stir processing, inter pass cooling process,] and oscillation process strategy. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there has been no research in the literature that analyzes the strategies to improve the quality and productivity of the wire arc additive manufacturing process.