Safe and fast flow coating on hand moulding with alcohol based coating
Year
2022
Customer
Ferromatrix NV, https://www.ferromatrix.be/en
Installed equipment
ARENA CPP 300 LT , ARENA Vibro-filter, ARENA E-pump
Target
Safe operations
Fast cycle time
Some additional benefits
No manual handling of the coating
ATEX certification of the coating process
Lower maintenance and energy costs
Some significant data
96%
min OEE
1 h
per shift operator savings
1 min
max time for opening / closing of the cover
100
Lt/min average coating flow rate by E-pump without pulsation
The customer
FERROMATRIX is a high precision iron foundry producing grey, ductile, vermicular iron and special alloyed cast iron (eg. SiMo) on 2 furan moulding lines for castings up to 3.000 Kg and 5 Ton-moulding division for long castings up to 7 metres with extreme straightness
FERROMATRIX meets the highest quality standards as requested by their high end customers. Moreover, thanks to the automated production process, they have a 100% traceability of all your pieces in production.
From demand to solution
Ferromatrix has installed in 2020 an automated cores dipping system ALL-in-ONE for cores up to 900 kg. Based on the first positive installation, their foundry and maintenance manager Stefaan Geers came with another challenge: review the complete process of flow coating building a huge flow coating station (6mt x 2 mt) including a movable lid and an automatic coating preparation and control.
The flow coating station working with alcohol based coating is located close to the pouring area and, for safety reasons, the flow coating area must be safe and provided with all ATEX certifications and the lid of the flow coating station has to close and open within 1 minute to catch the customer specs for optimizing cycle time.
The coating, pumped by the E-pump and controlled in the CPP Coating Preparation Plant, is now already to be used, in the previous installation the operator was forced to manual control and preparation, now the exceeding coating is collected immediately by gravity into the preparation tank minimizing the coating on the tray and the maintenance for cleaning. Moreover, most of the foundries using flow coating suffers the heavy presence of sand into the coating: a Vibro-filter is connected for batch sand filtration from the coating using a mesh of 500 microns.
The coating consistency
The accuracy and repeatability of the coating layer thickness (related to scrap level, casting rework, casting dimensions, etc..) are highly related to coating consistency kept by the CPP thanks to the automatic density control Density Sentinel and also by the laminar flow of the E-pump. Since the installation of the ARENA equipment, the casting surface finishing has improved and it is definitively consistent while the old installation was dependent by the operators making, as consequence, the casting surface finishing unpredictable.
FERROMATRIX takes care of the maintenance and the complete plant minimizes all activities from cleaning of the flow coating tray collecting the coating into the preparation tank of the CPP by gravity feed to the E-pump (in use since 1 year without any maintenance activity). The ARENA Vibro-filter is activated discontinuously and it allows always to scrap the agglomerates of sand and dried coating generated by the wet / dry on the tray without any operator.
