Control architectures for industrial additive manufacturing systems

As the emergent technologies of Industrial Additive Manufacturing become increasingly employed in commercial manufacturing environments, challenges arise in terms of how resources of the manufacturing system should be marshalled and controlled for sustainable manufacturing. While control architectures are well established for conventional manufacturing, to-date there has been little explicit consideration for Industrial Additive Manufacturing. This article provides redress for this research gap by exploring four feasible control architectures employed in current manufacturing practice. Drawing upon 12 case studies and the operations of three companies, the relative merits, demerits, and challenges for each architecture are explored in terms of changeability criteria for sustainable manufacturing

Spontaneously formed porous and composite materials

In recent years, a number of routes to porous materials have been developed which do not involve the use of pre-formed templates or structure-directing agents. These routes are usually spontaneous, meaning they are thermodynamically downhill. Kinetic control, deriving from slow diffusion of certain species in the solid state, allows metastable porous morphologies rather than dense materials to be obtained. While the porous structures so formed are random, the average architectural features can be well-defined, and the porosity is usually highly interconnected. The routes are applicable to a broad range of functional inorganic materials. Consequently, the porous architectures have uses in energy transduction and storage, chemical sensing, catalysis, and photoelectrochemistry. This is in addition to more straightforward uses deriving from the pore structure, such as in filtration, as a structural material, or as a cell-growth scaffold. In this feature article, some of the methods for the creation of porous materials are described, including shape-conserving routes that lead to hierarchical macro/mesoporous architectures. In some of the preparations, the resulting mesopores are aligned locally with certain crystallographic directions. The coupling between morphology and crystallography provides a macroscopic handle on nanoscale structure. Extension of these routes to create biphasic composite materials are also described

Computer applications in steel industry

An overview of the current status of computer applicat-ions in the steel industry has been presented from the point of view of process automation and control. Specific areas covered range from sintering to rolling - including energy and transport management. It has been concluded that development of more intelligent man-machine interface for computer aided analysis, simulation and implementation of control system coupled with advances in software engi-neering, parallel processing, high performance graphics and artificial intelligence based systems have led to cons-iderable advancement in all areas as evidenced by signi-ficant improvement in both the plant productivity and pro-duct quality, the world over. Efforts being made in India in general and at R&D Centre of SAIL in particular have been highlighted. In this context, generation of our own technology and a rational and intelligent selection and adoption of various technical advances has been emphasised

The potential of additive manufacturing in the smart factory industrial 4.0: A review

Additive manufacturing (AM) or three-dimensional (3D) printing has introduced a novel production method in design, manufacturing, and distribution to end-users. This technology has provided great freedom in design for creating complex components, highly customizable products, and efficient waste minimization. The last industrial revolution, namely industry 4.0, employs the integration of smart manufacturing systems and developed information technologies. Accordingly, AM plays a principal role in industry 4.0 thanks to numerous benefits, such as time and material saving, rapid prototyping, high efficiency, and decentralized production methods. This review paper is to organize a comprehensive study on AM technology and present the latest achievements and industrial applications. Besides that, this paper investigates the sustainability dimensions of the AM process and the added values in economic, social, and environment sections. Finally, the paper concludes by pointing out the future trend of AM in technology, applications, and materials aspects that have the potential to come up with new ideas for the future of AM explorations

INNOVATIVE TRENDS IN RAW MATERIALS HEAT TREATMENT

The purpose of research and development in the field of raw materials extraction and treatment, is a significant component of the Slovak economy, is economical, efficiency and sustainable use of available raw materials in compliance with principles of environmental protection. This complex problem involves a wide range of necessary activities from the exploration, extraction, processing to final utilization of mineral resources. Innovations of higher level based on scientific knowledge that lead to change of research focus from operational research on conceptual issues are desirable. Present research results show that qualitative innovations may ensure higher order improvement. In complex systems, such as the area of mineral resources, is necessary to find the complex optimum involving the entire value chain from research through mining, processing, primary and secondary (recycling) processing of raw materials to creation of new products and technologies. Environmentally friendly innovative and intelligent raw materials processing can only be achieved with the active support of information and communication technology (ICT), information and digitization of the processes and equipments and advanced automation - SMARTization of the processes and technological nodes. Thereby, it ensures the autonomy of these intelligent nodes and their functional verification under pilot and operating conditions. Thus, the substantiation of an advanced technology implementation into the mining companies practice can be shown

Control architectures for Industrial Additive Manufacturing Systems

Industrial Additive Manufacturing technologies are increasingly being employed in manufacturing environments, yet there has been little consideration of these in terms of manufacturing systems. This paper explores the important concept of control for Industrial Additive Manufacturing Systems, drawing upon data achieved in twelve case studies to identify four feasible control architectures. Using an abductive approach, this paper contributes to a recognized knowledge gap in operations and manufacturing management research