Proper Material Tracking for a Continuous Aluminum Production Process

Abstract

Compared to discrete manufacturing, sheet material is produced in a continuous manufacturing process with several dimension and volume changes. This includes thickness reduction by rolling and width and length changes by slitting and cross-cutting. Along the process chain, this happens several times using different manufacturing facilities, where each work step is usually followed by coiling. Each of these machines records high-frequent production data in a time-based manner. General research topics in this field [1, 2] aim to assign the time-based records to the related section of the alloy sheet (length-based). This paper deals with challenges concerning the identification of strips and the assignment of the corresponding process data. In a particular application, the coil orientation for each process step is calculated and documented for a given part of the production process. This is a necessary precondition for further process data assignment. Furthermore, the effort for certain manual tasks can be reduced by using the calculated coil orientation.