Towards an Adaptive Production Chain for Sustainable Sheet-Metal Blanked Components

Up to 250 fine-blanked components per luxury-class vehicle make a considerable contribution to the automotive production supply chain. High scrap rates in an industrial setting imply an inefficient use of the resources and process design and cause avoidable CO₂-emissions. This contribution focusses on a data-driven production cycle optimization of workpiece quality features and enabling efficient usage of resources in a production chain for the life cycle of fine blanked components. As one of the quality features in fine blanking, the die roll reduces the geometric accuracy and the functional surface area and thus needs to be removed in a secondary finishing process, typically grinding. An experimental setup is deployed using an industrial fine blanking and surface grinding machine on a shopfloor interconnected by an Edge-/Cloud-Architecture. This approach enables quality feature prediction and process adaption to enhance workpiece quality and efficient usage of resources, eventually leading to increasingly sustainable process chains.