"Foundries use a 5,000-year-old technology and there has not really been anything new," Christof Heisser, president of MAGMA Foundry Technologies, says. "Simulation is really the only thing that has happened to the industry that has made a fundamental change in how you run your foundry and how you make money."
Shaking the Foundations
Product design in the foundry has historically required a good deal of costly guesswork.
"For every new product or design, you have to take regular production off the line to do test runs to tell if the part works," Heisser says. That review process costs companies thousands of dollars and needs to be replayed over and over again until the right combination of temperatures, cooling times, risers and every other variable is found.
This process severs communication between each department and the customers, leaving each piece of the production puzzle isolated and in the dark during long experiments, revisions and retests.
Bringing the process up-to-date with simulation software however, has the potential to radically transform the business.
While offering some general perks like reduced energy and material consumption and easing the rework and trimming requirements, Heisser notes, "These tools can open a line of communication between the engineer and a partner on the shop floor."
Using appropriate tools, he explains, rather than sending simple plans down the line, the engineering department can include critical parameters on temperature thresholds, fill rates and process requirements for best results.
"They can say to them, ‘Here are the parameters or the work window you have to use and here's what happens when you don't do that,'" he explains. "This way the production floor gets much more buy-in as to why certain parameters are given to them."
Even more so, he says, "If you can use it for internal communication, you can obviously use it for external communication. So you can go to the customer and say this part is really tough to make because of this thin wall here where we cannot drill through. Here's an idea of how we can change that and you resolve that issue and the part is manufactured. Or the part gets cheaper to make, or gets made faster, or with fewer defects."
Looking at it like this, he says, can be quite a shift for manufacturing executives. "The CEOs and the presidents of the world, whenever they see the word 'simulation,' they immediately send it to an engineer," Heisser says. "But this has a much bigger reach than just the engineering department. It reaches every department of the operation. It fundamentally changes the way you operate."
