AZTERLAN presents the keys to develop a 4.0 HPDC strategy at the EUROGUSS 2020 fair

Within the Druckgusstag 2020 congress focused on HPDC technologies, researcher Emili Barbarias has shared the experience of the Technology Centre in the development of integrated 4.0 industry solutions for aluminium foundry.

One more year, the internationally well-known aluminium foundry technologies fair has fostered the “Druckgusstag” congress, dedicated to aluminium and its liquid-state transformation technologies. As a part of the official program of the Congress, AZTERLAN researcher Emili Barbarias, specialized in aluminium and light materials, has presented the work “A reliable data capture system for a robust 4.0 HPDC strategy” developed along with ELECTRONICS GmbH German company, a developer of aluminium transformation process control systems.

During his presentation, Mr. Barbarias has offered the main keys to implement a 4.0 strategy in HPDC, where “obtaining reliable, standardized, comparable and centralized data is a main difficulty”. As explained by the AZTERLAN researcher, “the main problem is not that aluminium foundry has no data to analyse, but that these data are incoherent and non-comparable”.

The monitoring systems of the different HPDC cells are developed by equipment manufacturers and, therefore, the definition of variables, their calculation and their accuracy vary from one machine to the other. Because of that, implementing an independent sensor network that permit to capture the relevant phenomena is the only way to settle a robust process data analysis strategy.

With this aim, the HPDC expert has offered some keys to implement sensorics referring that “sensors must be located the nearest possible to the phenomenon wanted to be controlled”. Through different examples, the aluminium technologies expert has shown the different results obtained by controlling similar phenomena in different stages of the process and has highlighted the great importance of correctly selecting and combining indicators. In his words, “at least, capturing the injection curve and certain temperatures, would be a basic staring point for the aluminium foundry”.

Presentation of AZTERLAN researcher Emili Barbarias, aluminium and light materials expert, at the “Druckgusstag” congress

Mr. Barbarias has also remarked the technical and economic scalability of any implementation of these characteristics suggesting that it must adapt to the real possibilities and needs of the organization”. “It should be considered that, in the short term, the main benefit prosecuted by means of 4.0 technologies is to maximise the time that equipment operate in correct conditions, reducing the rejection rates”. In this sense, he has proposed a progressive implementation, aligned with the capacity of the organization to exploit the data captured..