In the paper the topic of Building Information Technology BIM is investigated. It is new in Polish circumstances technology for construction and for building product industry, which contribute to change and develop level of industrialization. Especially challenge raising from the information and introducing IT technology into daily practice is considered to provide changes in construction branch of economy. In Poland there is the hot need of start to introduce BIM as the common technology for owners of assets, facility management, construction entities, design offices, administration officers and many other players relative to construction data and processes. BIM technology introduction, basing on foreign case studies, results in cost savings, control and time reduction of investment processes and some more advantages. The perspective of digital buildings, digital infrastructure, digital roads, digital railways and digital cities is outlined at the perspective of technology challenge, but simply transfiguration of many fields of personal everyday life, where digitalization is already present and with the question when it will be common in professional activity, particularly in civil engineering.
The problem considered in the paper is motivated by production planning in a foundry equipped with the furnace and casting line, which
provides a variety of castings in various grades of cast iron/steel for a large number of customers. The quantity of molten metal does not
exceed the capacity of the furnace, the load is a particular type of metal from which the products are made. The goal is to create the order
of the melted metal loads to prevent delays in delivery of goods to customers. This problem is generally considered as a lot-sizing and
scheduling problem. The paper describes a mathematical programming model that formally defines the optimization problem and its
relaxed version that is based on the conception of rolling-horizon planning
The paper discusses the impact of the geometry of foundry pallet components on the value of temperature gradient on the wall crosssection
during heat treatment. The gradient is one of the most important factors determining the distribution of thermal stresses in these
items. Analysis of quantitative simulation was carried out to detect possible effect of the type of connection between pallet walls and
thickness of these walls (ribs) on the interior temperature distribution during rapid cooling. The analysis was performed for five basic
designs of wall connections used in pallets. Basing on the results obtained, the conclusions were drawn on the best connection between the
ribs in foundry pallets.
Mathematical programming, constraint programming and computational intelligence techniques, presented in the literature in the field of operations research and production management, are generally inadequate for planning real-life production process. These methods are in fact dedicated to solving the standard problems such as shop floor scheduling or lot-sizing, or their simple combinations such as scheduling with batching. Whereas many real-world production planning problems require the simultaneous solution of several problems (in addition to task scheduling and lot-sizing, the problems such as cutting, workforce scheduling, packing and transport issues), including the problems that are difficult to structure. The article presents examples and classification of production planning and scheduling systems in the foundry industry described in the literature, and also outlines the possible development directions of models and algorithms used in such systems.
The problem considered in the paper is motivated by production planning in a foundry equipped with the furnace and casting line, which
provides a variety of castings in various grades of cast iron/steel for a large number of customers. The quantity of molten metal does not
exceed the capacity of the furnace, the load is a particular type of metal from which the products are made in the automatic casting lines.
The goal is to create the order of the melted metal loads to prevent delays in delivery of goods to customers. This problem is generally
considered as a lot-sizing and scheduling problem. The paper describes two computational intelligence algorithms for simultaneous
grouping and scheduling tasks and presents the results achieved by these algorithms for example test problems.
The article presents an example of analysis of the influence of selected parameters deriving from data acquisition in foundries on the occurrence of Gas porosity defects (detected by Visual testing) in castings of ductile cast iron. The possibilities as well as related effectiveness of prediction of this kind of defects were assessed. The need to rationally limit the number of possible parameters affecting this kind of porosity was indicated. Authors also benefited from expert group's expertise in evaluating possible causes associated with the creation of the aforementioned defect. A ranking of these parameters was created and their impact on the occurrence of the defect was determined. The classic statistical tools were used. The possibility of unexpected links between parameters in case of uncritical use of these typical statistical tools was indicated. It was emphasized also that the acquisition realized in production conditions must be subject to a specific procedure ordering chronology and frequency of data measurements as well improving the casting quality control. Failure to meet these conditions will significantly affect the difficulties in implementing and correcting analysis results, from which INput/OUTput data is expected to be the basis for modelling for quality control.
Access to up-to-date information on technology, innovation, source publications, and the materials and services offered in a particular industry is very important for both industrial plants and departmental research centres. It should be noted that obtaining such information using publicly available search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Bindu (mainly used in China) is only apparently easy because, due to their versatility, they deliver results with great redundancy. This leads to the need to analyze large data sets by linguistic methods or "manually", which is very tedious and time consuming. In this situation, it was considered reasonable to undertake studies aimed at acquiring relatively simple IT tools, i.e. crawlers, which allow their users to selectively search for information in a particular problem area, which in this particular case is casting. The intention of this work was to collect and analyze the experimental material that would allow describing the characteristics of the above solutions from the point of view of the range of their application, the quality of the results achieved, and possible limitations and preferences taking into account user needs [1, 2].
The article presents tools, methods and systems used in mechanical engineering that in
combination with information technologies create the grounds of Industry 4.0. The authors
emphasize that mechanical engineering has always been the foundation of industrial activity,
while information technology, the essential part of Industry 4.0, is its main source of innovation.
The article discusses issues concerning product design, machining tools, machine tools
and measurement systems.
The information technologies for assessing the quality of IT-specialties graduates' training of university by means of fuzzy logic and neural networks are developed in the article. It makes possible taking into account a wide set of estimation and output parameters, influence of the external and internal factors and allows to simplify the assessing process by means of modern mathematical apparatuses of artificial intelligence.
The dimensional accuracy of a final casting of Inconel 738 LC alloy is affected by many aspects. One of them is the choice of method and time of cooling the wax model for precision investment casting. The main objective of this work was to study the initial deformation of the complex shape of a rotor blades casting. Various approaches have been tested for cooling a wax pattern. When wax models are air cooled and without clamping in the jig for cooling, deviations from the ideal shape of the casting are very noticeable (up to 8 mm) and most are in extreme positions of the model. When the blade is cooled in the fixing jig in a water environment, the resulting deviations compared to those of air cooling are significantly larger, sometimes up to 10 mm. This itself does not mean that the final shape of the casting is dimensionally more accurate with the usage of wax models, which have smaller deviations from the ideal position. Another deformation occurs when the shell mould is produced around the wax pattern and further deformations emerge while cooling the blade casting. This paper demonstrates the first steps in describing the complex process of deformations occurring in Inconel alloy blades produced with investment casting technology by comparing results of thermal imagery, simulations in foundry simulation software ProCAST 2010, and measurements from a CNC scanning system using a Carl Zeiss MC 850. Conclusions are so far not groundbreaking, but it seems that deformations of the wax pattern and deformations of the castings do in some cases cancel each other by having opposite directions. Describing the whole process of deformations will help increase the precision of blade castings so that the models at the beginning and the blades in the end are the same.
By the very nature of their work, castings used in furnaces for heat treatment and thermo-chemical treatment are exposed to the effect of many unfavorable factors causing their deformation and cracking, significantly shortening the lifetime. The main source of damage are the micro- and macro-thermal stresses appearing in each cycle. As the cost of furnace instrumentation forms a significant part of the total furnace cost, in designing this type of tooling it is important to develop solutions that delay the damage formation process and thus extend the casting operation time. In this article, two structural modifications introduced to pallets castings to reduce thermal stresses arising at various stages of the cooling process are proposed. The essence of the first modification consists in making technological recesses in the wall connections, while the aim of the second one is to reduce the stiffness of the pallet by placing expanders in the external walls. Using the results of simulation analyses carried out by the finite element method, the impact of both proposed solutions on the level of thermal stresses was evaluated.
The article presents an integrated analytical and measurement system for evaluation of the properties of cast metals and alloys. The presented platform is an extension of the SLAG - PROP application with new modules, which allow to use information on metallurgical processes in an even more effective way, as well as to evaluate the finished product. In addition, the construction of a measuring station for the analysis of thermal processes taking place in a metal bath allows for precise observation of phenomena together with their appropriate interpretation. The article presents not only the cooling curves of certain copper alloys. The analysis also covered mechanical properties related to hardness, finished products depending on the mold in which the products were cast. In the literature one can find information about the mechanical properties of products in the improved state, usually after plastic or thermal treatment, omitting their properties obtained as a result of a naturally made casting. The article also presents the method of placing information in the database using a convenient graphical tool.
In order to predict the distribution of shrinkage porosity in steel ingot efficiently and accurately, a criterion R√L and a method to obtain its
threshold value were proposed. The criterion R√L was derived based on the solidification characteristics of steel ingot and pressure
gradient in the mushy zone, in which the physical properties, the thermal parameters, the structure of the mushy zone and the secondary
dendrite arm spacing were all taken into consideration. The threshold value of the criterion R√L was obtained with combination of
numerical simulation of ingot solidification and total solidification shrinkage rate. Prediction of the shrinkage porosity in a 5.5 ton ingot of
2Cr13 steel with criterion R√L>0.21 m・℃1/2・s
-3/2 agreed well with the results of experimental sectioning. Based on this criterion,
optimization of the ingot was carried out by decreasing the height-to-diameter ratio and increasing the taper, which successfully eliminated
the centreline porosity and further proved the applicability of this criterion.
The paper outlines the methodology of virtual design of a foundry plant as a system. The most important stage in the procedure involves the development of a model defined as a set of data about the system. Model development involves two stages: defining the model’s architecture and specifying the model data in the form of parameters and input-output relationships. The structure is understood as configuration of machines and transport units, representing the sub-systems and system components. As the main purpose of the simulation procedure is to find the characteristics of the system’s behaviour, the merits of the iterative method involving analysis, synthesis and evaluation of results are fully explored.
The article presents a study on the effectiveness of the foundries using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) method. The aim of the article
is to analyze the usefulness of DEA method in the study of the relative efficiency of the foundries. DEA is a benchmarking technique
based on linear programming to evaluate the effectiveness of the analyzed objects. The research was conducted in four Polish and two
foreign plants. Evaluated foundries work in similar markets and have similar production technology. We created a DEA model with two
inputs (fixed assets and employment) and one output (operating profit). The model was produced and solved using Microsoft Excel
together with its Solver add-in. Moreover, we wrote a short VBA script to perform automating calculations. The results of our study
include a benchmark and foundries’ ranking, and directions to improve the efficiency of inefficient units. Our research has shown that
DEA can be a very valuable method for evaluating the efficiency of foundries.