Manufacturing Safety and Quality
Summary
Manufacturing safety and quality encompass the systematic management of processes, equipment and human factors to prevent accidents, ensure product integrity and maintain regulatory compliance. Safety strategies range from machine guarding, risk assessment and ergonomic design to the adoption of industry standards such as ISO 45001 for occupational health and ISO 9001 for quality management systems. Quality assurance deploys statistical process control, failure‐mode analysis and real-time monitoring to detect deviations, reduce scrap rates and uphold product consistency. Recent advances in sensor integration, digital twins and data analytics have enabled predictive maintenance, inline defect inspection and continuous improvement loops that link workplace safety to product reliability. Across sectors such as automotive, aerospace, pharmaceuticals and food production, robust safety and quality frameworks not only protect the workforce and consumers but also enhance operational efficiency, support global supply chains and foster sustainable manufacturing practices.
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Manufacturing Safety and Quality publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in manufacturing safety and quality across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Billet: A heated, semi-finished metal block used as the feedstock in extrusion processes.
Porthole die: An extrusion die with internal bridges that split metal flow into channels and recombine streams through welding cavities to form hollow profiles.
Charge weld: The transverse bond formed between the end of one billet and the start of the next in billet-to-billet extrusion.
Solid-state welding: A bonding process in which separate metal streams coalesce under high pressure and temperature below the melting point.
Machine vision: Automated acquisition and analysis of images to detect, classify and localise product defects.
Convolutional neural network (CNN): A deep learning model employing convolutional layers to learn spatial feature hierarchies from images.
References
- Analysis of solid-state welding in extruding wide aluminium hollow profiles using a new three-container extrusion system. Journal of Manufacturing Processes (2023).
- Charge weld evolution in hollow aluminum extrusion: Experiments and modeling. CIRP Journal of Manufacturing Science and Technology (2024).
- Leather Defect Detection Based on Improved YOLOv8 Model. Applied Sciences (2024).
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