CEC has its roots in materials- and process engineering with more than 25 years of experience in the design of new material formulations to meet the required properties for new products and applications. But also, to significantly improve materials and with this product properties that make the decisive difference versus benchmark products.
Innovation in process technology is often a door opener for new products. It requires visionary thinking beyond traditional technologies. 3-D printing is here an excellent example allowing to shape most complex shapes which have simply not been doable with classical techniques.
Material design goes hand-in-hand with process design. Product quality requires process consistency, material formulations need to have a certain process robustness to absorb unavoidable process variations.
New or adapted process technologies can also be a door opener to cost reductions when it comes to simplify, reduce or shorten process steps along the production line.
Ceramic industries are often strongly linked to their traditional processes, - they are solid, well understood and stable. However, thinking beyond traditional technologies is also here a very valuable guide line to innovate, cut costs and even further stabilize as process steps can be reduced, simplified or shortened.
A new material design is required for a new client, a new product and a new application in the field of new energies. The product and with this the new material require a specification that cannot be covered by any existing C-norm or other standard ceramic.
The physical key properties can only be achieved by combining certain synthetic minerals to result in a new material composite after sintering with a tailored microstructure. Simultaneously to the new material development the shaping process had to be adapted to assure a broad process capability to prepare for a consistent production up-ramp. All this is only achievable with a highly skilled team of R&D- and process engineers as well as a network of experts and the spirit that the impossible is in fact possible.
A production line for mid- to high volume production in a well growing market segment faced continuously high loss rates, this in particular when product design changes were required. Process adaptions could not properly resolve the problems. The used body composition had not the flexibility or robustness for certain product design changes.
A body re-design was launched with a systematic root cause analysis to understand the reasons behind the poor process robustness of the current body, which revealed that certain body components and parameters were poorly controllable and led to the given limitations. Various sets of DoEs (design of experiments) allowed to adapt or exchange the critical body components, which systematically led to the required improvements in the production line.
A producer of high-performance ceramics runs a powder- and body preparation process for shaping with 7-9 sequential steps until the shaped product is ready for firing. The total lead time from raw material reception till ready-to-fire is excessively long and binds working capital with the WiP. The reasoning behind these process sequences is “tradition” and has never been challenged as the quality is stable. Other producers of different products, materials and applications run similar traditional processes with e. g. 5-7 sequential process steps.
However, the body preparation process can be reduced to 6 or even 4 steps with at least equivalent if not superior product quality and in a fracture of lead time and therefore reduced working capital and WiP. Some of the applied traditional process steps are not truly adding value and can simply be skipped and replaced by a single new process step. It is obvious that aside of reduced WiP and working capital, the production costs see also a significant reduction and with this a reduced CO2-footprint and waste water reduction.
It is the approach to simplify and think beyond tradition to understand that significant cost savings can be achieved reasonably quickly with an appropriate process development and careful qualifications.
