Enhancement of operational performance of a foundry

Abstract

As a result of rapid environmental degradation, there are several adverse impacts like increase in global temperature, Change in monsoon pattern, low air quality etc., which affect the living beings on earth. Hence, more stringent environmental laws are in place to control the release of harmful substances into the environment. Foundries are under tremendous pressure to comply with these environmental standards. The Operational performance of the various foundry departments plays an important role in minimizing the wastage of materials. The molding and melting are the important operations in a foundry. These two departments are more dependent on the skills of the workers for effective functioning. However, foundries yet do not have proper system for measurement of the performance levels of these departments. The present work focuses on the development of a feasible system for monitoring and improving the operational performance of the melting and molding departments in a foundry. The PDCA cycle was adapted to study and suggest a suitable system to the two departments. For the melting department, a Linear Programming model is formulated to calculate the amount of raw materials needed to obtain the required melt composition. For the molding department, The process parameters influencing mold hardness is optimized using Design of Experiments and a regression model is fitted to predict the mold hardness in real time. The study was done and validated in a foundry located in south India.