Quality Check & Deep Analysis
The quality control is the final production step, just before the castings leave the foundry. The purpose is to verify that all the requirements, given by the final customers, are achieved.
How is it possible, then, to connect all the results, given by these tests, to the prediction made by ITACA system at the production site? ITACA QualityCheck is the module dedicated to quality department, especially designed to be connected with ITACA Central database. The system logic works in two different steps.
1. Analysis of the casting batch
Because of the direct connection to ITACA X database, ITACA QualityCheck shows, to the operators, the production status of the batch they have to analyse. The main screen displays all the alarms related to that specific casting, suggesting them which are the main kind of defects that can affect the production batch.
2. Input of Quality Tests
In addition to the visualization of the production acquired parameters, it allows the insertion of real quality check results such as:
– Insertion of results from quality tests such as:
- Mechanical Properties
- Visual checks
- Hardness test
- Videos
- Penetrant Liquids
- Micrographies
- Xray
- Ultrasound
– Connection with SAP/ERP system
In this way, it’s possible to have a historical behaviour of the casting, making all the data traceable and available also in production.
It helps the foundry man to make easily the correlation between production process parameters results with real defects found at quality department, playing an important role in Integration, Continuous Control, Traceability and Knowledge Transfer.
DEEPER ANALYSIS AND TRACEABILITY
ITACA Analysis is a key ingredient in our Smart Foundry concept where it plays an important role in the integration, continuous control, traceability, and knowledge transfer.
The Analysis module permits to share the production process information through the different foundry departments. The interactive method of data filtering is useful to study the behaviour of alloys or castings for a different types of analyses.
Three different kinds of analyses are possible:
- Trends – presentation of parameters tendencies;
- Data Viewer – to recall the curves and filter them into the function of time, day/days of the week, casting, batch, and process state;
- Curve Comparison – to compare all the cooling curves and all the cooling speeds.
The interfaces of ITACA Analysis have been designed for different kinds of users:
- Operators: a trend of parameters control, associated with different sources of information (spectrometer, LECO, thermal analysis, sand properties, moulding line, pouring furnaces/ladle);
- Engineers/supervisors: comparison with a high level of detail, analysis of alarms and events;
- CEO/top managers: consolidated and extremely graphic analysis.
ITACAX continuously communicates with the other ITACA equipment, in a closed feedback loop. All the data are used to modify the correction of the next ladle, to ensure that the final iron is poured with near constant conditions and providing full traceability.
ADVANCED STATISTICAL REPORTS & DATA MINING
ITACA Analysis helps Foundries move faster, work smarter, and lead the way forward with an end-to-end solution for getting value out of data. It allows users to easily create and share interactive visualizations, reports, and dashboards. It provides a drag-and-drop interface and advanced analytics capabilities, empowering users to analyze and interpret data without requiring extensive technical expertise.
Used to gain insights from the data, make data-driven decisions, and improve business performance thank’s to the user-friendly interfaces, powerful data visualization capabilities, and strong data integration capabilities.
Monitors the status of the iron with thermal analysis and other process data by comparing current conditions with the requirements of each individual casting.
