I would like to blog about the opportunity most of us have in the casthouse to increase throughput in our operational areas and briefly give an example. The purpose of such a project is to maximise the output from any casting facility and identify any snags, bottlenecks, maintenance, production or process constraints.
The project should be run with focus, individually (i.e. 1 x VDC process route at a time) don't try and boil the sea and run several process streams in the casthouse in one go, you will get lost, swamped and possibly cross contaminate the data.
Communicate, as always, communication is the key to making such a project a success. Take the time to discuss the project, the goals and expectations and outcome with the teams.
If you have the option to discuss with the larger group during a town hall meeting, for example, then this would be the place to raise the focus on the project and get everyone's buy in from senior management to shop floor employee.
Things to consider:
Personnel
Cycle Time
Metal Delivery
Take off
Maintenance
Process Ready
Below is a typical example of a cycle time study conducted on a slab VDC line. The sample was for 8 drops, however as I said earlier the bigger the sample rate the better for data statistics. Don't be tempted to run the project over a period too long as this may impact the operations team and negatively effect the process.
From the fictional (but representative) data presented during the 36 hours period of the test, a total of 8 drops were cast. The average cycle time reached was 4:40 hours. This leads to a pace of 5.1 drops/day.
Now for the stress testing :
By excluding the downtimes for equipment and process issues, the cycle time decreases to 3:42 hours for a potential pace of 6.5 drops/day.
We can see that the main bottlenecks in the turnaround time are the pit stripping (partially based on operator skill (variation between shifts)) and the cooling of the slabs. During the test, the 25 minutes cooling time was used as per the recipe and safety instruction..
An interesting observation was found that except for one case due to furnace temperature, the preparation time did not impacted the overall casting cycle time.
With such 'hard' data you can clearly see that improvements are possible, with even just one additional cast per day (metal input permitting) the casthouse can make significant improvements, reducing the CIP (Cost of Ingot Produced) conversion cost and giving the sales and marketing teams more metal to sell, and in the current climate with the LME so strong that's not a bad thing!
Many thanks for taking the time to read this blog, please feel free to share with your friends and colleagues.
Should you still require further help on this particular subject reach out and please contact : albergtech@gmail.com
George