Low carbon, high efficiency and sustainable production of traditional manufacturing methods through process design strategy: Improvement process for sand casting defects

Energy saving and emission reduction in traditional manufacturing can be achieved by reducing the occurrence of defective products. Most of the existing optimization methods are obtained by referring to production experience and technical manual, which are time-consuming and laborious. Thus, a method of process selection and optimization for defective products in the design phase is required. In this paper, a process design strategy based on design parameters for eliminating sand casting defects is proposed. Firstly, the technological process and hole-type defects of sand casting are analyzed. The process design parameters are divided into three categories to propose a process design strategy. Three specific optimization schemes named OSP (structure parameters optimized process), OGP (gating system parameters optimized process), and OPP (processing parameters optimized process) are derived. Then a carbon emission prediction model is established to evaluate the effect of these schemes, and a sustainable manufacturing evaluation method with six indicators is also raised. Finally, a case study illustrates that 21%-24% of process carbon emission was saved after optimization on average. Among the strategies, OSP has the best energy-saving performance of average carbon emission, which is 4% lower than the others. OGP has the largest proportion of recyclable resources while OPP has the highest process yield and lowest adjustment cost. The results show that the proposed strategies can effectively improve the process yield, quality of casting, and decrease carbon emissions. The strategy raised in the paper supports the sustainable development of traditional manufacturing methods. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.