【111】The automatic alarm at 3 a.m.: Solving problems before they occur

【111】The automatic alarm at 3 a.m.: Solving problems before they occur

At 3:17 a.m., my phone vibrated, waking me up from my light sleep. It wasn't a call, but an alert push from the intelligent system: "Injection Machine No. 3, the monitoring point of the B zone of the mold temperature, has shown abnormal temperature rise rate for three consecutive cycles. It is expected that the temperature will exceed the process window in four hours." I opened the remote monitoring and saw that the curve on the data chart, which should have been smooth, had appeared slight zigzag waves. The on-duty engineer had already received the instruction and the system showed that he was retrieving the temperature history data of this mold for the past thirty days for comparison.

Three minutes later, the engineer replied: "The inspection is complete. The heating rod of the mold's hot channel has early signs of failure. It has been arranged for preventive replacement. Production has not been affected." I turned off the phone and continued to sleep. Such scenes occurred twenty-seven times in the past six months, each time the system gave a warning before the problem actually occurred. But when we went back to two years ago, the situation was completely different - then we were awakened at midnight by the urgent calls from customers: "These products have size deviations!" "The appearance has defects!" "They can't be assembled!"

The transformation began with that frustrating order from Huawei. They needed 5G base station antenna covers, and the positions of the 600 installation holes were required to be controlled within ±0.05 millimeters. Our first three batches had a defect rate of up to 8%, almost losing this important customer. At the problem analysis meeting, young process engineer Chen Hong, with red eyes, said: "We are like a fire brigade, where we go where there is a fire. Why don't we check the fire hazards in advance?"

This sentence woke everyone up. We began to build a preventive quality management system. First, we installed "health monitoring" sensors on each set of molds worth millions of yuan, which collected real-time data on temperature, pressure, and vibration, just like giving molds a 24-hour electrocardiogram. Secondly, we collaborated with Huazhong University of Science and Technology to develop predictive maintenance algorithms, which could predict the remaining service life of mold parts through data analysis. Thirdly, the system established a knowledge base, digitizing and standardizing the experience of senior workers - "The humidity is high in summer, adjust the holding time" "The fluidity of this material will deteriorate in the third quarter batches."

The most unexpected gain came from the cooperation with Gree Electric Appliances. They had an air conditioner diffuser blade, which always tended to have scratches at the same position during production. The traditional approach was to increase the injection pressure, but this would also cause other problems. After analyzing one thousand production cycles, our system gave an counter-intuitive solution: instead of increasing the pressure at a certain stage, it adjusted the cooling water flow channel slightly. After the adjustment, the scratches completely disappeared, and the production efficiency increased by 15%. The quality director of Gree came to Dongguan to learn. He said: "Your system has turned the intangible 'craftsmanship' into replicable 'science'."

I remember the morning when the system successfully gave a warning. It was the mold for the oxygen probe shell of Mindray Medical. The system issued a "top pin life warning" at 4 a.m., showing that the wear data of the three top pins was approaching the limit value. The mold worker got up to replace them, and the entire process only took twenty minutes, without affecting the morning shift production. The replaced top pins were measured, and the wear amount had reached 0.08 millimeters - if they were used for another half day, it would cause the product to deform during demolding, and those 400,000-yuan medical pieces would all be scrapped.

Now, this system has evolved to be able to adjust production parameters according to weather forecasts. If it detects that there will be a typhoon tomorrow, the system will automatically increase the power of the dehumidifier; if there is a 0.3% fluctuation in the melt index of that batch from the raw material supplier, the system will issue different compensation parameters to each machine. One customer joked: "Your production line is more sensitive than the meteorological station." This story is about a revolutionary shift from "fighting fires" to "preventing fires". When production lines learn to issue warnings before problems occur, and when every parameter fluctuation is monitored and analyzed in real time, a 0.5% defect rate is no longer a matter of luck but an inevitable outcome of precise control.

Pressing the pause button before defects occur - the Golden Eagle predictive manufacturing system makes quality controllable and visible.