IPF has developed 'My Foam Plant', a data acquisition system that saves money on foams and increases process efficiency. Angelina Venus talks to Simon Robinson.
Angel Vinas is a people with a sense of mission: Building a sustainable foam industry is more profitable and understanding how to produce high-quality foam blocks that give you the best cut yield in any situation without the need for black art Product
Vinas' main weapon in this battle was My Foam Plant, a combination of data acquisition and processing that statistically and flexibly characterizes and shapes flexible foam blocks directly into the age of raw materials; formulation, pouring and processing , Curing and storage conditions linked.
One of the challenges with polyurethanes is that they have many uncontrollable parameters: "We produce solids from liquids under different atmospheric conditions, and the recipe, physical parameters, and atmospheric conditions of the machine change, and as a result, Processing Form A on a B machine can produce different results, just as sunny days in Ecuador or rainy England. No one really tracks what is happening throughout the process.
This industry has the same problem: every new machine starts from scratch, and professionals on the platform who are responsible for producing high quality lumps of foam can not see all the parameters, and every minute he is on the conveyor Infusion of 500 to 1,000 U.S. dollars has a slight impact on the production of foam.
Vinas said: 'We give feedback as soon as possible in order to better grasp the foaming process, in order to ensure the maximum block cutting production.
Brain involvement
He said the process understood by data-driven polymer chemists and process engineers with highly educated qualifications may seem unfamiliar to the polyurethane industry, but in other areas such as international stock and money market transactions and attempts to make one's own Corporate self-driving car.
Vinas says: 'My Foam Plant looks at thousands of parameters simultaneously and finds correlations. The human brain can understand the correlation between two, three, or four parameters, but can not understand the correlation between 200 parameters Our algorithm can calculate which parameters are most influential.
This goes straight to the bottom line. "Raw material costs are a huge driving force for our customers and are efficiency-related, saying that My Foam Plant will help blowing agents control the process.
He says for each section you can see the amount of raw materials used, the physical parameters of the foaming machine and the in-process external conditions such as humidity or pressure, the temperature and shape of the evolved cure, and the delivery to the conversion department Finished shape.
'When you associate a product process with a product, you can begin optimizing and correlating process parameters with the output of the end product.
IPF uses two state-of-the-art industrial concepts: big data and machine learning will make people discard their prejudices.
To realize machine learning, the process learned how to change the foaming process to create a better quality foam in a more consistent shape, Vinas explained: 'Companies now need experts when they want to understand the foam process.'
'Because they know that chemical and physical experts understand this process. My Foam Plant uses different techniques to relate the process to the results. Now it's not so important to understand the link between physicochemical or chemical and process parameters because the system Relevance has been found, similar to the software used by companies such as Google and Facebook.
'The IPF model collects and stores a large number of inputs, correlates them, and then the system checks which parameters have the most effect on the end result, and we can start asking My Foam Plant questions.
'In our latest version, we focused on the size of the foam block as it relates to the quality and efficiency of the cutting process.We tried to count the effect of input and processing parameters on the final dimensions and the final shape of the block.We have seen some Interesting facts like ...
Compared with the planned foam block shape, the output difference of 5-15%;
Bubble height is not constant, there are important changes, only to be tracked from the best cut;
Block stability is much longer than we usually assume, depending on the type of foam and other process conditions
Automatic efficiency measurement is different from manual, more accurate, all foam blocks can be measured.
By using statistical methods and by measuring the number of measurements per second as the blocks are moved along the conveyor, it is possible to accurately relate a portion of the foam block away from the mixing head to the condition at the mixing head. Thus, the flow rate, chemical The proportions affect the cell structure and shape that can be attached to a foam block.
In addition to blistering process information, he said, production dates, cut preparation times, efficiency of the blistering process, or foam type, etc., such as shrinkage problems that are commonly discussed by professionals, are traced, Vinas said. The result is quite unexpected, even in the same case, where good foam blocks look very smooth in terms of visual effects, but the laser scanning process shows the presence of wrinkles, The height of the block fluctuates as its length fluctuates.
Vinas says: 'We can measure the effect of flow, the influence of each wave, which parameters lead to or relate to the gain or cold flow of the block before and after solidification, when the reaction is complete.
Vinas found that except for some wrinkles, in the extreme case, the square foam block was sometimes designed to broaden the lower part and narrow the top part.
Vinas said his interest in the product extends to the raw material manufacturer, because now that he has understood the effect of raw material changes after foaming and storage, he adds: 'We can also see the impact of raw material changes in the formulation.
'When customers talk to material companies about shrinkage or defects, they usually show simple samples or formulations; through our process, material companies can actually keep track of this information and they can also track foaming machine parameters at the time of the accident. The supplier can then see what happens when processing the raw materials, 'he said.
Open source collaboration
IPF, based in the Basque region of northern Spain, has teamed up with several other companies to develop open source software to connect with a variety of other mechanical operating systems, saying: 'We have a diverse group of people within the IPF.
We talk about the range of solutions available, he said, and we're talking about the range of solutions available. They come from a very simple, machine-linked version. The easiest setup (that is, what happened) - shows which machine is connected and made How many parts, and in real time, to show you what's going on in your factory, the easiest platform to share the same architecture as the most complex version we produce.
The WGO version uses charts and numbers to illustrate what is going on at the factory, and plant managers can see it online or at the machine's start, how many meters it produces, how many kilos it produces, when it is online or in the learning process , But did not elaborate.
Vinas explains that the intermediate version, currently unnamed, focuses on a single machine, so instead of looking at the whole process, we focus on some machines. If you have a machine that controls the output of your machining line, we compare machine Shift and efficiency, we can detect machine defects early in the planning re-calibration or maintenance.We can really from the machine exhaustive analysis of a large amount of information.
We have been developing this platform for the last 3-4 years and from the very beginning we were aiming to connect the machines to report on the performance of the process from raw materials to finishing.It is interesting that this did not give the customer a great deal of added value and We begin to focus on what can bring real benefits.
He said that the core version of the platform, internally called the 'brain' but lacking other designs, 'gathers information from production', we link the processing information to the product bit by bit, and now you can focus your attention Focus on a single foam block and summarize the entire process and the foam block's DNA.