Foundry 4.0: digitally recordable casting ladle for the application of Industry 4.0-ready manual casting processes

Abstract

The foundry industry is the main contributor of metallic components for a wide range of industry sectors, from automotive to medicine, from aerospace to the energy sector. Despite this crucial key role for our society, the foundry industry - in Germany characterized by more than 90 % small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) foundries - struggles with important future-orientated topics such as digitalisation and Industry 4.0, thus missing the opportunity to unlock comprehensive potentials for increasing efficiency. The reasons are manifold and range from a high proportion of manually performed work steps to a conservative industry character and a lack of know-how for the new technologies. For this reason, concrete (digital) solutions are required to meet the circumstances of this SME-dominated industry sector, the often high proportion of manual work steps and whose added value is immediately obvious to the users. The development of a digitally linked, patented sensory casting ladle presented here as a further development of a more than 3,000-year-old foundry tool still essential today aims for the digital, transparent recording and visualisation of all relevant process parameters of manual casting processes in order to increase reproducibility and thus improve sustainability through the reduction of rejects and (energetic) resources. In addition, the development presented in this article fulfils the requirements of the new Industry 5.0 initiative of the European Union, which follows a human-centred approach to future production models as a complement to Industry 4.0.