Foundry 5.0: Insights in and Potentials of Real-Time Collected Process Data during Manual Casting Manufacturing

Digitalisation and Industry 4.0 are finding their way into more and more socially and industrially relevant areas. Even sectors characterised by craftsmanship and small and medium-sized enterprises, such as the foundry industry, which is struggling with these topics for various reasons, can no longer escape this development. What is needed, however, are solutions that do justice to the individual conditions of the various companies and allow for easy implementation. Only this way small and medium-sized enterprises, which often have a low level of automation, will have access to the data-based insights that come with digitalisation, which above all contribute to a better understanding of their own processes and, based on this, to higher efficiency and competitiveness. This article describes the development and application of a holistic open-source soft-ware-based solution for the digital real-time acquisition, storage and visualisation of relevant process data along the process chain for the manual production of aluminium castings (but also higher-melting alloys) on a scalable prototype level. The casting ladle was developed according to the Industry 5.0 strategy of the European Union and includes, on the one hand, the use of sensor units for flexible process-related data acquisition and, on the other hand, the use of a new type of connected employee-centred casting ladle for real-time acquisition of the relevant process parameters during manual casting. The evaluation of the casting tests carried out within the framework of this setup not only proves an increase in the reproducibility of the properties of manually produced castings through the real-time visibility of the data. In addition, the subsequent data evaluation and transparency allows detailed insights into the production process, the prevailing casting parameters and their correlation with the achieved casting properties. The presented solution thus has the potential for the development of a deeper understanding of the casting-specific correlations between production parameters and achievable casting properties. This in turn enables the development and establishment of more tailored and efficient processes as well as more profound insights in the field of (academic) research and development as well as in the industrial environment.