Driving Innovation in Product Design and Manufacturing Using 3D Printing
optimization of each life cycle aspect is evaluated to ascertain how far each product is from an ideal solution. See Figure 6.
OLD SHAFT LEVEL INDICATOR vs METRO 3D PRINTED Life cycle aspect evaluation
METRO 3D PRINTED OLD SHAFT LEVEL INDICATOR
Maintenance
Measure Reliability
Production Cost 10
8 6 4 2 0
Manufacturing
Logistic
Operation Finetuning
Handling & Installation
Figure 6- Comparison between traditional shaft level indicator and 3D Printed METRO.
Considering the reduction of periodic maintenance on a set of 2 METROs, the Return on Investment( ROI) is 41 months for the low production kilns( 180 tpd) and 9 months for high production kilns( 800 tpd). With IIoT, equipment alarms data is collected and, translating the unplanned downtimes related to old shaft level indicator in loss of production, it has been estimated that the real ROI is 13.5 months for 180 tpd kilns and 3 months for 800 tpd kilns.
It has been estimated that upgrading the traditional shaft level indicator to the new 3D printed solution can save approximately 120 €/ tpd every year. Considering a lifetime projection of 10 years, upgrading to the IIoT solution can potentially increase revenue up to 1,400,000 € over the lifetime of the equipment, considering plant availability and maintenance optimization.
Evidence of the strongly reduced unplanned downtime are visible in the“ Year Unplanned Downtime Cost Impact” report( see Figure 7) showing how few occurrences were related to METRO.
- 50- January 2017