CPT International 4/2019

Technician carrying out precision
work. The pressure tanks for the
hydraulics in three vertical cylindrical
piston accumulators can be seen in
the background, on the left.
the Institute for Applied Nanotechnology
in Karlsruhe also receive support.
“One must give the researchers time to
tinker about, and retain good people
by paying them properly,” Dr. Ioannidis
points out the high status of research at
Frech.
Research, however, is not only carried
out on die-casting technology, but
Research work on a
die-casting plant in
Schorndorf-Weiler.
The new hot-chamber
die-casting machine for
aluminum, soon to be
available on the market
also regarding data capture – involving,
among other things, cycle times, material
compositions, and the time of production.
“We have 6,000 die-casting
machines in the field and most of them
are in productive operation. This quantity
of applications in the background
allows us to create meaningful linkages,”
affirms Dr. Ioannidis and adds:
“For us it is about a sensible processing
of big data to smart data.”
At the GIFA, Frech presented its
new smartfoundry.solutions in a large
hemisphere. The networked die-casting
foundry shown there visualizes all
the production parameters comprehensibly
in graphic form, enabling
comparison with older data as well as
data from other machines. And, in
future, it will be possible to predict
faults and determine maintenance
dates. In addition to the plants (the
hardware), digital products require
software. The focus in the company is
thus shifting even farther towards services,
which now already make up 25
percent of sales. An application from
the augmented reality segment is of
interest here: the Service Eye, which
supports repairs and maintenance.
Experts in the service headquarters in
Germany are connected acoustically
and visually, and can thus remotely
control every work step together with
the worker on the machine. Digital
aids should in future also simplify
orders of spare parts and consumables.
Just like at Amazon, customers will be
able to click through a virtual plant
and select parts.
3-D printing (or additive manufacturing)
is also a segment with potential
for Frech, of which Dr. Ioannidis and
his team are well aware. Testing is
already taking place with metal powders.
Components of the casting plant,
for example, can undergo close-contour
cooling – with advantages for component
durability, as well as for productivity
of the process (reduced cycle
time).
Acknowledgement from
the foundry industry
The inventiveness and high status of
research at Frech has also recently been
honored by the German Foundry Association
(BDG). At this year’s GIFA, the
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