Study Of Core-Making Process Optimization For A Casting Company

Foundry is a major production process in the machinery manufacturing industry,which accounts for a large proportion in the product manufacturing of various industries,and is also the basic industry of the national economy.Therefore,the development level of the foundry industry marks the development level of a country’s manufacturing industry.In the process from "planned economy" to "market economy",China’s manufacturing industry has gone through four stages: starting,stabilizing,developing and maturing,and has made some progress,but there is still a big gap between China’s manufacturing industry and that of developed countries.A Foundry Company is a modern foundry enterprise which mainly produces medium and heavy engine cylinder blocks and cylinder heads for commercial vehicles.In recent years,with the development trend of automobile energy saving and emission reduction,customers’ requirements for product quality have become more stringent,the development of new casting materials and new casting products has become more and more difficult,and the cost pressure from upstream and downstream has become greater and greater.However,there are some problems in stabilizing product quality,providing production efficiency and balancing production process,such as unstable product quality,low production efficiency and unbalanced load of production line.In this thesis,the cylinder head core-making unit of A Casting Company is taken as the research object,and the problems existing in the production process of the company are collected and analyzed by means of on-site interviews,on-site observations and data analysis.The key processes and reasons of unstable product quality,low production efficiency and unbalanced production line load were traced by using VSM value stream diagram,IE industrial engineering tools and fishbone diagram analysis method.Based on the theory of process optimization,the advanced manufacturing technology and the tools and methods of lean production are used to optimize the production process of cylinder head core-making unit.The production process optimization measures include: analyzing and optimizing the production process of key processes,improving the quality inspection in the production process with intelligent manufacturing technology,intelligent control of paint dipping,intelligent identification of core assembly station,and stabilizing product quality;The industrial robot is used to replace the manual work of the bottleneck process or the key process,and the supporting automatic logistics distribution system and MES system are designed to reduce waiting and eliminate waste to improve production efficiency.Based on the lean production theory and industrial engineering tools and methods,the core-making production process is improved,the production cycle is shortened,and the market demand is met.A foundry company cylinder head core-making process has been improved after the implementation of the optimization program and measures,the production efficiency increased from 18.2 pieces/H to 22.2 pieces/H,the scrap rate decreased from 1.05% to 0.79%,and the production line balance rate increased to 91.1%,which has achieved remarkable results.The process optimization method used in this paper has a certain reference value for similar foundry enterprises to achieve intelligent manufacturing and intelligent scheduling.