Improvement of the Centrifugal Barrel Finishing process in Luxottica factories "The importance of aesthetics as a quality parameter in the fashion and eyewear industry"

In recent years the concept of Quality has become fundamental for every company in the world, it is defined as the ability of the company to produce goods or services that fully meet the expectations of consumers. In the last few decades, due to an increasingly competitive market has become essential to analyze and understand the concept of quality using analytical tools as the Quality Function Deployment (QFD) analysis and the House of Quality model (HoQ), which drives the creation of any product and help the company to understand what the key features for a successful product are and how they can be related to technical characteristics. In this paper we will analyze the concept of quality in fashion and eyewear within Luxottica factories, seeing how the concept of quality is closely linked to the aesthetics of the product. From this important result, we will analyze which are the processes that have the focus on the aesthetics of eyewear, to improve these processes. In this sense, the Centrifugal Barrel Finishing (CBF) process is one of the many Luxottica processes that has the greatest impact on eyewear aesthetics, preparing the surface of eyewear for the final phases of galvanization and painting. The polishing department of the Luxottica plant in Agordo will therefore be studied in-depth, with a focus on the world of tumbling with the aim, through a series of tests, of reducing the cycle times of tumbling operations, which last on average more than 6 hours. Through hardness measurements on the materials most used in the factory and roughness measurements on test temples subjected to the tumbling process with the creation of a dedicated DOE, we will be able to analyze the process in-depth, linking the aesthetic quality with objective parameters, to obtain the highest surface quality. At the end of these studies, we’ll see the close relationship between the type of materials processed and the aging of the granules inside the machines. Combining these factors in the best possible way, we will be able to drastically reduce the cycle time and gain in terms of process costs. Ultimately, the analysis has been applied on metal frames composed of various assembled components of different materials, previously establishing the parts of the frame that, also for geometric factors, offer greater resistance to abrasion. Therefore, obtaining different cycles in terms of time and aging of the granulate, depending on the different types of material and geometry of the models.