Exploitation of Material Property Potentials to Reduce Rare Raw Material Waste: A Product State Based Concept for Manufacturing Process Improvement

摘要

Manufacturing companies today face fierce globalcompetition and volatile and rising prices on an ever morerestricted natural raw material supply market. Customersdemand high quality of the purchased products and supplyingcompanies have to find ways to fulfill these customerrequirements. In general, there are two ways how companies canmeet specific requirements when material properties are in thefocus. On the one hand, they can choose a material which exceedsthe required specifications and produce the product from thatmaterial. That way, the final product is mostly over engineered,not by over dimensioning but by the high grade material of choice.Another way is, to take a material, which basic materialproperties are not meeting the requirements yet and change thematerial properties through processing to exploit the materialproperty potential.The first option can make sense when the material is widelyavailable and reasonably priced. But most of the time, such a highgrade material is in high demand and short supply and thus oftenhigh priced and the supply unsteady. The other option, improvingthe material through the manufacturing process, should secure asteady, plan able supply and a better possibility to forecast pricesfor the material. As materials, especially high grade and highvalue ones became increasingly rare and die exporting countriesof specific raw materials start to implement more and morerestrictions, the second option seems to have high chance to growin importance in the near future.To exploit materials property potentials through the process, asolid understanding of mechanisms of manufacturing processhave to be available for the stakeholders. The manufacturingprocess will become more complex which will trigger the need fora better understanding of the process, material and product andtherefore information and knowledge involved to achieve theplaned and customer demanded quality. To help themanufacturer to gain and handle the required knowledge andinformation about their manufacturing processes, materials andproducts, the product state based view can provide a holisticconcept to compile valid information during manufacturing,including the mapping of interdependencies over the wholemanufacturing process chain and identification and delivery ofthe relevant information to the right addressee. The concept isbased on the understanding, that a product can be described by itsstate over the whole lifecycle by a set of relevant statecharacteristics. The challenge is to identify the right set ofrelevant state characteristics for the individual product, processand material. With this works, the authors plan to contribute tothe goal of exploiting material property potential to a higherextend and reduce over engineering and thus waste of valuableresources.