Design and Analysis of Automatic Loading and Unloading of Casting After Fettling Process

There are approximately 5000 foundries in India, largely in the Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSME) sector, located in various foundry clusters. Every year India produces more than 11 million metric tons of cast products, and India is the 2nd largest country in the world to produce cast products. Nearby 70% of foundries are still not adopting industry automation for several reasons, so automation in the casting process is the need of the hour today to produce precision and quality products to meet the world market demand. TATA Technologies Limited and MSME, Belagavi, Karnataka, India, jointly initiated a sponsored program in collaboration with industry and academia to overcome the challenges of implementing automation in foundry industries and promote the adoption of Industry 4.0. The objective of this project is to provide an automation solution to one of the re-known foundries in Belagavi, Karnataka, India, for cast products. Generally, the fettling process is carried out manually involving a large number of laborers and is time-consuming. In our research, after the fettling process planned to design customized automated guided vehicles (GAV) to improve the transportation of heavy cast products to different finishing machines. It reduces labor fatigue while handling heavy cast products and redesigning the floor layout of the finishing section to increase productivity. A comparison of the present status of the production system and automated production system concerning the mode of the transport system to various finishing machines.. The number of laborers involved and the operating cost at the finishing section are discussed in this project.