Smart Melting: Increasing Efficiency in Non-Ferrous Melting and Die-Casting Plants through Incident Management

摘要

This study is part of the project Smart Melting in the research cooperation Green Factory Bavaria (GFB). The main targets of the project are the improvement of the key figure OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) and the reduction of the energy consumption in the non-ferrous die-casting industry. By implementing a software tool in the factory of an industrial partner, which collects the essential data to improve maintenance, a necessary requirement for an incident management is created. This article focuses on the current state of data acquisition in the plant of the industrial partner and the estimated potential of process improvement by an incident management system. The collected incident data of the producing die-casting machines are processed and analyzed. In the data analysis the incidents are classified according to their cause and assigned to the respective machine. The time to repair (TTR) and the time to failure (TTF) are investigated in order to obtain statistical probability distributions. The TTR is an exponentially distributed value and the TTF can be depicted using the Weibull distribution. A simulation model based on statistically concentrated data is used to determine the effects of a better incident management on the key figure OEE. An improved maintenance reduces the number of incidents and increases the TTF. An improved incident management which shortens the downtime reduces the TTR. As a result of the improvements the availability factor of the OEE increases remarkably. Additionally an increase of the quality factor (proportion of good parts) of the OEE can be expected.