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Foundry Corporate News Topic Moulding

30. June 2025

by Olaf M. Kramer, Heinrich Wagner Sinto Maschinenfabrik GmbH

Pressemitteilung | Reading time: min | Bildquelle: Heinrich Wagner Sinto Maschinenfabrik GmbH

In order to survive in international competition, you have to produce high-quality products at an attractive price. What sounds simple poses immense challenges for our customers due to changing framework conditions.

The demands on us, the foundries and plant manufacturers come from a wide variety of directions:

society calls on us to significantly reduce energy demand
we compete with attractive jobs
international competition puts us under pressure with low labour

Energy-related optimization of the foundry

Even during the design of the systems, modern foundries are planned in such a way that the energy consumption is limited as much as possible. For this purpose, we use FEM and FEA. In simple terms, this means that we build as solidly as necessary and as light as possible. Every kilogram of moving masses saved reduces the energy requirement. Drives can also be designed more efficiently.

Drive technology has made quantum leaps in terms of energy efficiency. Both electric and hydraulic drives can recuperate. With modern control technology, these drives are almost shock-free, highly efficient and standard in good systems.

In hydraulics, highly efficient servo pumps are used to optimize idle times as well as oil heating and cooling.

Monitoring of the entire process chain

In recent years, our products have been given a comprehensive range of new additional functions thanks to networked control technology. Far beyond condition monitoring, sensors monitor machine technology, especially the production process, such as monitoring the mold hardness on the model during pressing.

In the past, the focus was primarily on quality data. With derived sustainability and efficiency data from these parameters, new and intelligent control and regulation specifications for the operation of the plants were developed. One of these innovations is our so-called "Green Button" function, a highly efficient automatic shutdown of the hydraulics that significantly reduces energy costs at idle.

A completely different goal is the unambiguous identification of the castings. At the last GIFA, the laser marking process of the SINTOKOGIO Group attracted a lot of attention. Not only experts recognized that the marking of cores and even green sand molds, transferred to the castings, closes exactly the gap that had always been desired in order to be able to assign the entire production chain to a specific casting. By means of the identification number or a QR code on the casting, batch data of the sand preparation, all measuring and control parameters of the molding line, history data of the cores, and all data of the casting furnace or casting machine can be assigned to the casting.

All this plant, process and casting-specific data is collected in the plant control system and can be transferred to any MES or ERP system.

This creates a complete history of the casting piece throughout the entire manufacturing process. This is exactly what foundries, but also the customers of the products, have always wanted.

Deduction of the scrap rate

A consistent focus on good parts in conjunction with lessons-learned results in a reduction in waste as a waste product.

With a consistent good part orientation in control technology, the aim is to save any subsequent resources if a mold does not meet the quality requirements:

If the sand does not meet the specifications, it is discharged directly. If the pressing pressure of the moulding machine is not within the set specifications, the mould is marked as "defective" so that the downstream machines know:

No pouring funnel, no air holes to drill
No cores and no filters used
The mold is not to be poured off
And the mould box is routed through the cooling lines by the shortest possible route so as not to occupy unnecessary cooling capacities.

It would be fatal if bad castings were only noticed in the fettling shop or, even worse, only at the customer's premises. These measures are intended to rule this out.

Result

Within the last 30 years, production in the foundry has changed significantly due to the arrival of high-tech. If the foundryman receives digital support in addition to the craftsmanship skills he has learned, this gives him the opportunity to produce the perfect casting piece reproducibly. Until now, foundries had to balance different variables in such a way that an acceptable product was created in the end. A consistent focus on good parts means that the foundry process can be regarded almost as a constant.

So why waste your time troubleshooting? It is better to use the time gained to optimize the process and products to the limits of what is feasible. This also inspires young people to work for us and this is exactly what causes the desired technological and competitive advantage.

This is not just an issue for new installations. Increasing efficiency is explicitly also a real issue for existing foundries.

It is the clever ideas and a consistent focus on efficiency that minimise the life cycle costs and thus the unit costs of each casting.

Olaf M. Kramer, 14.04.2025