Exploitation of Material Property Potentials to Reduce Rare Raw Material Waste A Product State Based Concept for Manufacturing Process Improvement

Manufacturing companies today face fierce global competition and volatile and rising prices on an ever more restricted natural raw material supply market. Customers demand high quality of the purchased products and supplying companies have to find ways to fulfill these customer requirements. In general, there are two ways how companies can meet specific requirements when material properties are in the focus. On the one hand, they can choose a material which exceeds the required specifications and produce the product from that material. That way, the final product is mostly over engineered, not by over dimensioning but by the high grade material of choice. Another way is, to take a material, which basic material properties are not meeting the requirements yet and change the material properties through processing to exploit the material property potential. The first option can make sense when the material is widely available and reasonably priced. But most of the time, such a high grade material is in high demand and short supply and thus often high priced and the supply unsteady. The other option, improving the material through the manufacturing process, should secure a steady, plan able supply and a better possibility to forecast prices for the material. As materials, especially high grade and high value ones became increasingly rare and die exporting countries of specific raw materials start to implement more and more restrictions, the second option seems to have high chance to grow in importance in the near future. To exploit materials property potentials through the process, a solid understanding of mechanisms of manufacturing process have to be available for the stakeholders. The manufacturing process will become more complex which will trigger the need for a better understanding of the process, material and product and therefore information and knowledge involved to achieve the planed and customer demanded quality. To help the manufacturer to gain and handle the required knowledge and information about their manufacturing processes, materials and products, the product state based view can provide a holistic concept to compile valid information during manufacturing, including the mapping of interdependencies over the whole manufacturing process chain and identification and delivery of the relevant information to the right addressee. The concept is based on the understanding, that a product can be described by its state over the whole lifecycle by a set of relevant state characteristics. The challenge is to identify the right set of relevant state characteristics for the individual product, process and material. With this works, the authors plan to contribute to the goal of exploiting material property potential to a higher extend and reduce over engineering and thus waste of valuable resources. KeywordsProduct State; Manufacturing; Material Properties; Information; Process; Quality; Raw Materials