AI Foundry Increases Efficiency with Automated Coreroom.In today's foundries, turnkey solutions put mechanical engineering to the test. Hottinger North America North America, third largest continent (1990 est. pop. 365,000,000), c.9,400,000 sq mi (24,346,000 sq km), the northern of the two continents of the Western Hemisphere. , Inc., Taylor, Michigan Taylor is a city in Wayne County in the U.S. state of Michigan. The population was 65,868 at the 2000 census. Taylor was originally known as Taylor Township and residents of the township voted to incorporate as the City of Taylor in May 1968. , designed, supplied and implemented such a turnkey, fully automated coreroom in cooperation with Ford Motor Co. for its new Cleveland Aluminum Casting Plant (CACP CACP Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police CACP Coalition Against Counterfeiting and Piracy CACP Community Aged Care Package (Australie) CACP Camptodactyly-Arthropathy-Coxa vara-Pericarditis syndrome ), Cleveland. In addition to the "conventional" mechanical and electrical equipment A piece of electrical equipment is a machine, powered by electricity and usually consists of an enclosure, a variety of electrical components and often a power switch. Examples of Electrical Equipment
In order to meet the casting supply, a foundry engineer must determine the net productivity of the future facility. The coreroom consists of several individual but linked core machines and the respective core handling equipment. Each device has a certain availability less than 100% due to maintenance or failures and their repair. Downtimes are measured with statistical descriptors such as the Meantime Between Failure (MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) The average time a component works without failure. It is the number of failures divided by the hours under observation. MTBF - Mean Time Between Failures ) and the Meantime To Repair (MTTR (Mean Time To Repair, Mean Time To Restore) The average time it takes to repair a failed component. See reliability. MTTR - Mean Time To Recovery ). Mathematically, the total uptime of a core shop is a function of the statistical behavior of the individual components and their mutual interaction during production. Since there are serial and parallel links as well as redundancies, it is not a simple task to accurately specify the influence of each single device on the availability of the entire core shop. Hottinger uses a software tool to simulate all linked production processes of the complete coreroom. This allows evaluation of complicated scenarios in a relatively short time frame. The tool integrates required production figures with statistically monitored data of already existing plants and simulates production based on the planned CAD layout. This simulation provides forecasted production rates from the startup phase to a steady production in future years. However, to obtain an optimal solution, the power of the simulation tool has to be combined with the know-how of experienced engineers. In the case of Ford's CACP, the simulation showed most valuable improvement ideas such as: * utilization of buffers; * independently operating handling units; * optimized ganging of coreboxes; * contingency plan A plan involving suitable backups, immediate actions and longer term measures for responding to computer emergencies such as attacks or accidental disasters. Contingency plans are part of business resumption planning. for manual operation; * consistent, replicable concept throughout the coreroom. |
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