In 2021, the tide of intelligent manufacturing swept across the manufacturing industry. It has risen from the intelligent manufacturing to “Made in China 2025”. The manufacturing industry is the very foundation of the national economy, for building our country and for making it powerful, the rise of China’s manufacturing industry also represents the rise of China. Refractory enterprises used to procure advanced equipment from abroad at the expense of high price and inconvenient maintenance, while now the performance of domestic intelligent equipment has far exceeded that of imported equipment with more advantage in price, better services and more environmentally friendly as well.
In the refractory production line, the whole process, from automatic raw material batching, automatic mixing, automatic weighing and spreading, to automatic forming by press, automatic brick discharging, automatic detection, brick picking and palletizing, has realized unmanned operation. The intelligent production of refractories not only improves the working environment and greatly reduces the labor intensity of workers, but also improves product quality and work efficiency, reducing the production cost and management intensity of enterprises.
Intelligent batching and mixing processes
In the past, the raw materials crushed to the designated size in the refractory mixing workshop had to be weighed, batched and mixed manually. The problems such as deviations in proportions and uneven mixing are very likely to occur during the operation, which seriously affects the product quality. Meanwhile, the resulting dust severely exceeds the limit for working environment, and greatly threats physical and mental health. Furthermore, the traditional equipment also has many disadvantages, including loud noise, low efficiency, and numerous safety hazards.
A domestic company has successfully developed a fully automatic mixing system, which can in the conventional measuring mode convey the materials from the storage bin to the measuring hopper through the feeding mechanism and stops after reaching the formula weight. The feeding mechanism is equipped with screw conveyor, electromagnetic vibration feeder, belt feeder, rotary feeding valve and chute, etc. according to different material characteristics. With high precision and fast speed, this system is suitable for powder and granular materials with good fluidity, and the technological process of refractories with strict requirement for batching precision.
Intelligent forming system
The traditional process for producing refractory bricks requires manual operation of heavy presses. It is not only time-consuming and costly, but also has a high billets rejection rate.
As for now, the full-automatic press developed by a company is a high-tech product integrating mechanical, electrical, hydraulic, pneumatic and computer technologies, which consists of main structure, hydraulic system, feeding system, electrical control system and die handler, etc. It can automatically complete the operations of spreading, pressing, demoulding, brick clamping and spraying in the pressing process. By adopting various core technologies, it can meet the production needs of products with various raw material characteristics, structures and sizes. It can easily and quickly change moulds and lock them automatically. The machine has a user-friendly operation interface and remote fault diagnosis technology facilitating parameters adjustment; and by configuring a remote communication device, it can also establish a remote communication system for users to provide timely remote fault diagnosis services and greatly facilitate program improvement and upgrading. Other benefits of the product include dust-free production environment, high degree of automation, low human factor influence, low labor cost and high production efficiency.
In terms of quality, the size of the products produced by full-automatic hydraulic press is precisely controlled within the minimum error range, generally less than ±0.5% for the formed brick billets, which can minimize the porosity and increase the density of the finished products. This kind of hydraulic press can effectively solve the problems of powder agglomeration and segregation, to ensure that the powder falling into the mould cavity is uniform, so as to ensure the weight error of the bricks within the product requirements. At the same time, it also significantly reduces the defects of the bricks caused by the traditional brick press such as missing corner and edges, burrs, pitted surfaces, layer cracks and distortions, thus significantly improving the quality of the products made.
Intelligent palletizing process
In traditional refractory enterprises, both raw and finished refractory bricks need to be palletized manually, while the handling and automatic systems directly install the brick clamping devices (vacuum or mechanical clamping devices, or even more sophisticated devices such as rotary clamping devices) on the press to convey the pressed product. On the other hand, there are system devices equipped behind the press, such as kiln car palletizing system device, which are usually designed and built on the basis of programmable industrial robots using special brick grippers (systems). In addition, all the automatic needs in the terms of packaging and palletizing, labeling system and other intelligent equipment requirements currently used can also be met.
Intelligent detection process
Traditionally, refractory bricks produced by refractory enterprises need to be inspected manually piece by piece after they are cooled out of the kiln. Now, the refractory bricks are automatically detected by electronic eyes for cracks, missing corners and edges and layer cracks; then by optical instruments for small defects; and finally for the density, size, distortion, arch degree and compressive strength of each brick by ultrasonic scanning, laser electronic instrument and weight sensor, and if necessary, the deformation modulus is also detected. Unqualified bricks are rejected, and qualified ones are affixed with cardboard and steel plates, automatically packed and sent to the warehouse.
Fully-automatic intelligent equipment is only a small part of refractory intelligent manufacturing. In the future, refractory enterprises will realize on-site productive process management, monitoring and control of the intelligent production line, including data collection and analysis of the intelligent factory production process, to achieve operability and visualization of the production process, equipment, and resource monitoring; support the requirements of collecting different on-site equipment data, and support the displaying of the production data and equipment failure information on monitoring station screen to achieve the dynamic production process monitoring and management; realize the interconnection and communication among the intelligent equipment, robots and production lines, and users in the whole process, to achieve high-quality, efficient and flexible automated production under man-machine and machine-machine interconnection.
Most Chinese refractory enterprises can improve their efficiency and reduce costs by 30%-50% through the value chain process and business model of R&D—procurement—production—marketing—after-sales service, and the rest is achieved through intelligent manufacturing. Manufacturing enterprises can only achieve true intelligent manufacturing after equipment digitalization, workshop digitalization, and lights-out manufacturing.
As China is a world manufacturing power, our manufacturing industry will conduct more profound research and practice on how to innovate concepts, systems and technologies, establish independent industrial brands, and take a new step forward in the intelligentizing of industrial manufacturing. Centering on the strategic platform of “Made in China 2025”, Chinese industry will surely lead us to a magnificent transformation from a power of quantity to one of quality.