Simple Solutions That Work! Issue 11

71 MAKING YOUR INSTALLATION ASUCCESS Contact: PUSHKRAJ JANWADKAR pushkraj@versatile.in A VCAT-II installed right above the molding machine can serve following functions: 1. It can check compactability, moisture, permeability and green strength of sand when the sand in falling in the molding machine hopper to make the mold. 2. It can acquire pattern/ tooling number from supported molding machine PLCs or by user input through an HMI provided near molding machine. 3. It can send data to cloud with V-Sync data acquisition and cloud sync module and can also work with standard SCADA systems. 4. It can retain control parameters for each pattern/tooling and raise an alarm if the measured quality parameters of the sand falling in to the molding box deviate from control plan at the same time it also activates an output which can potentially destroy or mark/ identify mold for not pouring. 5. It can communicate with supported green sand testing and control systems (such as VCAT-II) working at mixer and automatically increase or decrease compactability set-point, in order to achieve correct parameters at the testing station VCAT-II installed above the molding machine. This indeed completes a feed-back loop makes way for a possibility that, varying moisture loss due to temperature variations is automatically taken care of by adjusting water addition at the mixer itself and sand strength can be automatically adjusted by adjusting bentonite addition at the mixer. When automatically captured data from apparatus like this and other analogue devices such as energy meters for mixer, current monitoring devices on sand plant, simple manual core production machines fitted with counters, temperature monitors, come on one common platform on cloud, with powerful analytical and machine learning capabilities available at a small cost would make it fun for a foundry manager to establish causality and predict when something good or bad is going to happen. CONCLUSION Repetitive actions like testing and registering data can be completely mechanized, drastically reducing need for skilled man-power. With devices like V-Sync, data can be acquired even from very old devices and they can be made internet ready. With the help of connected devices, when cross-functional data, right from production, melting, sand plant and other departments is available on a single platform, automated analytics and in due course direct action on process through AI and ML is a near future possibility. All this, assuming we provide the machine learning platforms with credible data – remember GIGO. Monitoring and improving productivity with IOT & 4.0, without monitoring and improving quality with IOT & 4.0, is like racing with a horse without bearing rein.