Automation Solution for
Metal Industry

Incoming ingots to the castor often have varied properties/chemical combinations. The solution needs to record these properties. These records form the essential inputs while charging the batches (thereby adjusting the process environment).

In the Extrusion Industry, the optimization of output from billet is a key to financial success. The Optimization engines need to manage / optimize the outputs from individual billets of metal.

The metal processing industry is one of the few industries where the management & accounting of the scrap are crucial to the profitability of the manufacturing of the product. The management & accounting of scrap needs to be an integral part of the ERP system.

Optimizing the cutting of metal sheets into smaller parts is a significant challenge in the metal sheet industry due to material wastage, inefficient nesting, and precision issues. Inefficient nesting-where parts are poorly arranged on the sheet-leads to excessive off-cuts and wasted material.

For good quality and economical Extrusion the quality of the die through which the section is extruded has to be of excellent quality. Minor variations in the size of the die can lead to uneven sections being extruded. Further over used dies lead to thicker sections being extruded too. This not only causes deviations from specifications/requirements but also leads to huge losses of material. At the time of initially using a die, an optimum level of extrusion quantity is specified for each die. This die history is extremely essential.

There are variations & loses at each stage of production. The monitoring engine needs to be constantly monitoring the yield at each production stage to determine the yield at each stage. This is essential not only from a cost perspective but also form a materials planning perspective.

Around 50% of manufacturing overheads cost comprises of utilities such as Energy, Fuel, Water supply. If left unmonitored may lead to huge costs and losses.

Breakdown of machines may often lead to unplanned downtime in manufacturing operations leading to loss of production. Lack of predicting such machine breakdowns may result in last moment rush for spares inventory ordering & struggle in allocating maintenance engineers to resolve the problem. Monitoring machine parameters such as Temperature, Pressure, Humidity, Current on real time basis and understand the pattern of the machine failures remain a challenge for this industry.

Quality Control at the Casting stage - The molten material and cast billets are tested for parameter for the required alloy. Recording of this can help in analyzing the composition of charging material to provide perfect quality. The QC can record the purity / impurity of rejected output. Quality Control at the extrusion (upto ageing) stage and in the value addition stage (Anodising & Powder coating).