Focusing on casting: Mature application case studies of Aotlai’s intelligent automated warehouse.
Publish Time:
2025-03-27
Casting is an indispensable and vital link in the development of the equipment manufacturing industry, serving as a crucial support for the advancement of numerous key technological equipment and major machinery.
Foundry is an indispensable and vital link in the development of the equipment manufacturing industry, serving as a crucial support for the advancement of numerous key technological equipment and major machinery. Benefiting from the huge demand for castings in the equipment manufacturing sector, China has significantly accelerated the development of its foundry industry clusters. At the same time, driven by market factors such as logistics costs, the layout of the foundry industry has been rapidly adjusted, leading to “further increased industrial concentration and further optimized industrial distribution,” “gradual improvement in advanced casting technologies and casting equipment levels,” and the emergence of “green and low-carbon” approaches as new directions for the foundry industry’s development.
In 2022, a casting enterprise established a factory in Anhui, with an annual production capacity of 62,000 tons of high-quality castings. To address challenges such as limited technological capabilities, high labor costs, and low production efficiency, the factory decided to embark on a technological upgrade, building an intelligent production line and investing over 100 million yuan in smart modernization. After in-depth communication with the enterprise, Aotlai took智能化 (intelligent) and数字化 (digital) approaches as its key strategies, leveraging the advantages of automated solutions to design a fully intelligent production line covering the entire process—from sand core fabrication and sand core marking to on-line buffer storage, sand box molding, casting and forming, and shot blasting of finished products.
The project consists of a sand-core automated storage and retrieval system with pallet conveyors, a core-box/mold automated storage and retrieval system with inbound and outbound conveyors, and a WMS management system. A total of two stacker cranes are used for inbound and outbound operations. The sand-core warehouse can handle cargo weighing up to 1,000 kg and accommodates an inbound and outbound throughput of 40 pallets per hour. The mold warehouse is equipped with a dual-station stacker crane capable of handling cargo weighing up to 4,000 kg, with a crane height of 7 meters. After empty pallets are transported via conveyor to the inbound loading point, the stacker crane receives instructions to store these empty pallets in the sand-core warehouse. At the same time, to meet the requirements for loading sand cores onto pallets, the stacker crane can retrieve empty pallets from the warehouse and transport them via conveyor to the sand-core loading station, thereby satisfying the storage needs of various core boxes and molds of different sizes using just one stacker crane.
Through the development of intelligent manufacturing, this factory has achieved remarkable results in reducing labor costs, improving product quality, cutting energy consumption, and boosting production efficiency. In the first half of 2023, the company’s production capacity significantly increased, a feat made possible by the support of its intelligent three-dimensional warehouse. Outele will also leverage the mature experience gained from this sand-core three-dimensional warehouse, replicate key technological insights, and share its expertise with more sand-core warehouses in the casting industry. Focusing on the realization of intelligent manufacturing in the casting sector, Outele will join forces with an increasing number of upstream and downstream partners to jointly build a path toward high-quality development for China’s casting industry.
Keyword:
Stacker
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