Question

A Printed Circuit Board (PCB) machine installs integrated circuits onto a board. Before starting to produce a board, the PCB machine requires a 20 minute setup. Once in production, the PCB machine requires only 0.15 minutes per board.

Currently, the PCB machine produces 500 boards between setups. Given this operating process, what is the capacity of the PCB machine (in boards per min)? ____ boards per minute (Round your percentage answer to 2 decimal places.)

Answer 1

The capacity of the PCB machine, considering the setup and production time, is approximately 5.26 boards per minute.

Step-by-step explanation:

To calculate the capacity of the PCB machine, we need to consider both the setup time and the production time per board. The machine requires a 20-minute setup and then takes 0.15 minutes to produce each board. By producing 500 boards, the time taken for setup is spread over those 500 boards, effectively adding a small amount of time to the production time of each individual board.

First, we calculate the total time to produce 500 boards including the setup:

• Setup time: 20 minutes
• Production time: 0.15 minutes/board × 500 boards = 75 minutes
• Total time: 20 minutes (setup) + 75 minutes (production) = 95 minutes

Now, we find the capacity by dividing the total number of boards produced by the total time:

Capacity = 500 boards / 95 minutes = approximately 5.26 boards per minute

Therefore, the capacity of the PCB machine is roughly 5.26 boards per minute.