Simple Solutions That Work! Issue 11

Contact: TROY TURNBULL [email protected] CAST STUDY – DIE LUBRICANT PROPORTIONAL MIXING SYSTEM We were tasked with the opportunity to develop a monitoring system that would adapt to existing Die Lubricant Proportional Mixing Systems and would do the following to eliminate the need for daily monitoring, charting and system evaluation from valuable production, maintenance or engineering staff members. The critical monitoring variables requested were: • Monitor Current Oil GPM • Monitor Current Water GPM • Monitor Current Batch Dilution • Monitor Current Batch Gallons Produced • Save Batch History • Monitor Critical High and Low Ratio’s and Alarm • Monitor System Pressure • Monitor All Critical Items Remotely and Alarm when out of spec. As discussed in this article, die lubrication is a critical part of the casting process. If your Proportional Mixing system has a hiccup and the lubricant proportional mixing pump goes bad, you run the risk of filling your entire plant with either Hi or Low dilutions of mixed product or worse yet straight water and doing severe costly die damage to all of your running dies in the plant. If your distribution pump goes bad your run the risk of no lubrication being delivered to the plant and causing severe die damage. With our newly developed system, all these critical areas of monitoring are all done simultaneously; they can be viewed from your desk top computer or 56 your smart phone. Also, multiple people can be added to the monitoring system list so off shift staff can view critical lubricant process variables as well. So, how does this system help with the defect prevention process? Most companies monitor the critical dirty dozen of the casting process for each machine. This includes metal temperature, shot speeds, shot pressures, shot positions, water flow, die temp, spray and blow off times etc. Now you can know that your critical die lubrication process is being monitored and will notify you at precisely the moment a failure with the system occurs. This will help prevent Solder, Porosity, Non-Fill, Cracks ext and save you from costly rework, tooling damage and most importantly customer complaints.