Six Sigma Methods Applied to an Inlet Particle Separator Design

The application of Six Sigma design methods to an inlet particle separator is presented in this paper. As stated in the book “Design for Six Sigma Memory Jogger” Six Sigma is a collection of methods that guides “developing new processes, products, and services that meet customer requirements upon the initial offering”. The process involves obtaining input from relevant sources on the technical requirements. The information is then prioritized to facilitate decisions on the most important design parameters and figures of merit. The decisions are used to formulate the design/optimization problem. The commercially available Isight software is used to perform the design/optimization study. The analysis involves the use of twodimensional geometry generation, mesh generation and flow analysis for each configuration studied. Once the flow field has been established a discrete particle model is run to determine the sand separation efficiencies for each particle size. The process is repeated using a design of experiments approach. Due to the length of time required to complete one configuration, a response surface approach is used to perform optimization within the complete design space.