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Aluminum foil is a key material for the food and pharmaceutical packaging industries. The packaging and non-packaging industries use foil extensively for their products to protect from possible deterioration from moisture and ultra violet ray. In the process, it is statically identified by the Aluminum association as highly demanding commodity. Formability, printability and excellent barrier properties make the aluminum foil a perfect choice for protecting and preserving both food and pharmaceutical items in complex environment. In fact, the foil acts as a barrier for those items.
Industry expert’s opinion says that the packaging industry in India is growing at a rate of nearly 15% per annum. It may be observed that the total demand for aluminum foil is projected around 187,596 tons and 256,562 tons without export and 206,355 tons and 282,218 tons with export during 2014-15 and 2017-18 respectively. While India produces only 100, 000 tons per annum. Therefore, there is a huge gap in supply and demand chain. As the foil manufacturing plant is very capital intensive, it will be appropriate to improve the process efficiency of the existing foil rolling mills. Accordingly, a research has been initiated for the process improvement with the existing plant of Gujarat Foil limited.
In India aluminum foil is manufactured by cold rolling of the aluminum sheet whose thickness varies from 650 micrometer to 300 micrometer and width about 1 meter to 1.5 meters using Achenbach foil rolling mill. For getting the acceptable quality end products, several factors are responsible. These are input materials, mill speed, mill temperature, operating condition, lubrication etc.
In the present communication, three major factors have been focused. These are Roll change process, Speed optimization for improvement in hour per ton (HPT) production and Recovery. The data and experimental work for this paper work are collected and performed in the facility of one of the highly reputed industries in India called Gujarat Foils Limited.
In this industry, the roll change process is performed 22 to 24 times on an average in a month hence, it is very important to reduce the roll change process time. This can be achieved while using some management techniques, such as work system engineering, autonomous maintenance, parallel activities sequencing, Pareto analysis etc. This can be reduced the roll change process time up to about 15 minutes which significantly adds in total productivity. Speed optimization was done by collecting the previous 5-6 months data and then the HPT was calculated. The calculated HPT for the different type of product is then compared with the actual HPT of the month. The gap between the two is nothing but the saving or improvement in HPT, when the mill runs on the maximum speed calculated for a particular pass schedule. The overall recovery of the foil mill is affected due to waste or loss generated during the production. To improve the recovery of the mill, waste management techniques are employed and the result gives the acceptable limit of viii recovery at the end. Finally, the favorable results which help to improve the productivity of the plant are clearly achieved. |
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