Many small and medium-sized manufacturing companies process various product types to respond different customer orders in a single production line. To improve their productivity, they often apply batch processing while considering various product types, constraints on batch sizes and setups, and due date of each order. This study introduces a batch scheduling heuristic for a production line with multiple product types and different due dates of each order. As the process times vary due to the different batch sizes and product types, a recursive equation is developed based on a flow line model to obtain the upper bound on the completion times with less computational complexity than full computation. The batch scheduling algorithm combines and schedules the orders with same product types into a batch to improve productivity, but within the constraints to match the due dates of the orders. The algorithm incorporates simple and intuitive principles for the purpose of being applied to small and medium companies. To test the algorithm, two case studies are introduced; a high pressure coolant (HPC) manufacturing line and a press process at a plate-type heat exchanger manufacturer. From the case studies, the developed algorithm provides significant improvements in setup frequency and thus convenience of workers and productivity, without violating due dates of each order.

Currently, the cutting oil supply device is not equipped to cool the cutting oil. Therefore, additional cooling device should be connected to cool the cutting oil. This has the disadvantage of increasing the size of the device and reducing its cooling capability. To overcome these shortcomings, cooling coils are applied to the outside of the cutting oil filtering device to develop a heat exchanger filter for simultaneous coolant filtering and cooling to improve the compactness of the cutting oil supply device and cooling capability of the cutting oil. For the development of heat exchanger filter, flow and heat transfer analysis were performed. Due to the small heat transfer area of 10 cooling coils, less heat exchange occurred. In the 20 cooling coils, the coolant cooling coils prevented smooth flow of the cooling oil in the heat exchanger filter. The cooling efficiency of the 15 cooling coils were best, and the cooling temperature decreased non-linearly as the supply flow rate of the cutting oil increased.