Uttam Sarda, Technical Director, Shree Magnets Pvt Ltd shares the top three predictions for the manufacturing industry, the company’s growth statement, bestsellers and use cases.
Sarda Magnets Group is among the leaders in designing and manufacturing of magnetic work-holding, clamping, separation, lifting systems and other magnetic equipments. Presently headed by the fourth generation entrepreneurs, the group has already been granted two patents and applied over five new patents on Electro Permanent Magnetic systems. The company has three manufacturing units, one each at Kolkata, Hyderabad and SriCity. The Sricity facility is the latest and caters to the growing demand of lifting magnets.
Top Predictions
Industry 4.0
Industry 4.0 is the emerging digital industrial technology that helps manufacturers collect and analyze data across machines, speed up processes and produce high-quality goods at low costs. Industry 4.0 will help producers in India compete globally with increased productivity.
The ubiquity of connectivity as we are seeing in the country, the rise in the volumes of captured data and the availability of smarter machines, the growing deployment of additive manufacturing and robotics will fuel the adoption of industry 4.0 in the world and the Indian manufacturers will have no option but to follow the trend.
Additive Manufacturing
Additive Manufacturing is the industrial adoption of 3D Printing, and, to define it in simple terms, a process in which machines add layers upon layers of material to build 3D products.
It may be argued that Additive Manufacturing (AM) provides an alternative to the conventional subtractive manufacturing process. However, AM will continue to grow, one assumes, not at the expense of conventional manufacturing process, but to increase the fields of advanced manufacturing process in areas that require superior precision such as aviation (jet engines) and healthcare (medical implants).
Machine Learning
Stanford University defines Machine learning as the science of getting computers to act without being explicitly programmed. In recent times, machine learning has given us speech recognition, web search, self-driving cars, and a greatly improved understanding of the human genome.
Globally, machine learning applications are helping manufacturers improve optimize manufacturing operations to the shop floor level and vastly improve product quality.
A Mckinsey report says that machine learning has increased semiconductor manufacturing yields up to 30%, reduced wastage and optimized fab operations. Predictive maintenance of industrial equipment aided by machine learning will generate a 10 percent reduction in annual maintenance costs, a 20 percent downtime reduction and 25 percent reduction in inspection costs.
In the next five years, manufacturers are going to use a combination of emerging technologies including IoT, AI, and machine learning to improve asset tracking accuracy, supply chain visibility, and inventory optimization.
VISION 2023: GROWTH STATEMENT
“Sarda Magnets is growing at a rapid rate for the last three years. We have three manufacturing units, one each at Kolkata, Hyderabad and SriCity. Our Sricity facility is the latest one – it caters to the growing demand of lifting magnets. Having been approved as an R&D house by Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR), we have been developing products which are future ready and much easy to use. At the same time, we have been adding the latest machinery to ramp up the production and cutting down delivery times. Having more than 15 international patents to our account, we are pioneers in the field.
Looking at the current market scenario and product line up for next five years we are quite sure that we will be market leaders in the industry. Magnets for work-holding is still an obscure field to many; we have to educate the customer and have to eradicate the imaginary fear and misconceptions about using magnetic fixtures for machining. We have been developing magnets which are self-intelligent and can be very useful when it comes to operation, monitoring and accessibility. Our teams are working round the clock to make sure that clamping a job becomes a cake walk.”
BESTSELLERS
Magnaslot– Electro Permanent Magnetic Bed for machining. The biggest advantage of this product is accessibility to all five sides while machining. Easy to operate and extremely flexible when comes to frequent setup or job change.This system is very useful in batch production or mass production or tool rooms. There is no fear of loosening of job even after prolonged machining. Until unless the magnet is demagnetised the job will not be released or moved.
Bat EPM– Lifting loads and transport them using battery Electro Permanent Magnetic Lifter has made life easy for our customers. You do not have to reach the magnet physically to operate the lever. Using its flux sensing magnets operates on its own. This helps in easy and fast movement of material without compromising with safety.
EP Press– Clamping of Moulds on Injection Moulding machines has been a great challenge and time consuming. EP Press makes life easy for machine operator to set up the mould. These magnets are designed keeping in mind the safety of operator and machine by using variety of sensors. Even a slightest movement of mould, change in operating temperature immediately sends the signal to machine. These magnets are capable to handle all the impact loads that an injection moulding machine generates. The touch screen panel allows to customise and check all the pre-requisite data before starting a machine.
CASE STUDY
MAGNASLOT for Manufacturing of Connecting Rod
We have successfully installed MAGNASLOTS at machining shop of a leader in DG Sets to machine connecting rod. The facility is located in Western Maharashtra.
The general method to clamp the connecting rod is to hold the component by using internal expanding chuck in big end and small end. These internal expanding chucks do not allow the move the job horizontally but while machining there is always chances of the job getting lifted from the location. To arrest this vertical movement, one hydraulic clamp is also used at non machined area on the component. Due to this clamp there are chances of bending component, which leads to rejection of component which is a huge loss.
With MAGNASLOT, only the horizontal movement of the job has to be arrested. The MAGNASLOT does not allow vertical movement. This resulted in increasing the cutting feeds from 560 mm/min to 750 mm/min (tried upto 1250mm/min).
This helped the customer increase the productivity by 20% and most importantly reducing the rejection rate to 0%.