Description
Key Learnings
- Discover the challenges facing the water industry in regards to maintaining and replacing obsolete parts.
- Discover the advanced manufacturing technologies used in a repair workflow.
- Explore the time and cost benefits gained from repairing legacy parts on demand.
Speakers
- KHKristian HaagensenKristian is the Head of Asset Intelligence at Northumbrian Water Limited (NWL), he is responsible for driving intelligent asset management through the strategic use of data, analytics, and innovative technology. He leads a versatile team of professionals who work on key areas such as asset data management, content management, and the development of advanced analytics and insights. By continuously enhancing knowledge, data quality, and digital capabilities his team aims to optimize asset performance, health and criticality.
- Tom HemansI work in the Birmingham Technology Centre using Fusion 360.
TOM HEMANS: Welcome to our talk for 2024, Revolutionizing the Maintenance of Water Infrastructure, an innovative collaboration with Northumbrian Water. In this cross-industry collaboration, we have taken a novel approach to solve the challenges facing Northumbrian Water with repairing broken parts and extending the operating lives of assets.
We hope this case study will demonstrate how using advanced manufacturing technologies can improve a water company's resilience and, ultimately, save money for their customers. This is the safe harbor statement. So, who are we?
KRISTIAN HAAGENSEN: Welcome, everyone, and thanks for joining us to hear about the great work Northumbrian Water Group and Autodesk have been up to and listen to us explain our journey so far. I'm Christine Haagensen. I head up our asset intelligence function at Northumbrian water across in the UK. And today, I'm going to explain why this project was so important to us as a company, but also to our customers.
TOM HEMANS: My name is Tom Hemans. I'm a Senior Manufacturing Specialist at Autodesk. I work in the Customer Engagement team, part of the Fusion organization. I am based in the Autodesk Technology Center in Birmingham, UK, and primarily work with customers on metal additive and hybrid manufacturing case studies and proof of concepts to demonstrate the benefits and drive adoption of these emerging technologies.
So, what are the learning objectives of this talk? One, to discover and appreciate the challenges facing Northumbrian Water with maintaining and replacing obsolete parts. Two, to discover the advanced manufacturing technologies that are available to help. And three, to explore the time and cost benefits gained from this cross-industry collaboration.
KRISTIAN HAAGENSEN: To give you a little bit of context, Northumbrian Water is a large water and wastewater utility across the UK. We sit under a government regulator and serve in excess of 2.7 million customers across two operating regions, providing our customers with sustainable water and wastewater services. We're a leading asset management company with a huge focus on caring for essential needs of our communities' environment, now and for generations to come.
We do this by providing reliable and affordable water and wastewater services. Our vision is to be national leader. And to achieve this, we recognize that we need innovation. I'd go as far to say that we have innovation within our DNA, as an organization, and always looking for opportunities to improve what we do.
As with any large asset management utility, we have an aging asset base. Just because something is old, doesn't mean it's not fit for purpose. But we do need to tackle increasing obsolescence. Many of our assets, or parts, were manufactured as far back as the 1950's. These great engineering companies that made them are no longer in existence. And there's no aftercare, no spare parts, sometimes, and nearly always, little to no data available.
We're a 24/7 business and have a responsibility to our customers to keep water flowing to the likes of hospitals and schools all day, every day. Service outages within our water production or wastewater treatment has serious consequences for the customers we serve. And we must do everything we responsibly can do to maintain our high levels of customer service.
We take the health of our assets seriously. And as a leading asset management company, we know that one of the sustainable ways we can keep customer bills low and achieve our net zero targets is to extend the operating life of our assets. Our operations and maintenance team do a great job looking after our infrastructure, but we know we will have parts that will wear and break that we don't always have a spare for.
As a worst case, with the needs of a temp solution like overpumping to take place, we can see significant costs. We could, with downtime, with assets cost us $2,000 a day. Excellent. We could also, understanding that some parts we can get next day or next week, but we are seeing a steady rise in the average lead in time for parts as they're shipped around the globe. In extreme, it can take us up to 40 weeks to receive a part and get a system back up online.
Our maintenance reliability engineering team are non-stop at this and some of the best in the industry. But they repair and replace over 15,000 parts a year. So even though that's just a small percentage of our overall asset base, it's still a significant number.
And finally, we're spending about $28 million within this space, ensuring our assets keep running to the high standards we demand. So a typical part, a typical part we're seeing failures on are cast items that were maybe manufactured 50, 60, or even maybe 70 years ago.
This is a belt pulley from one of our sewage treatment works. The top feature sheared off during operation and this is what our maintenance technician on the ground found when he opened up the machine at one of our sewage treatment works. It isn't a stock item on the shelf. And it's not a part our team could manufacture within their own depot. So what do we do? Next slide, please.
So as part of our commitment to adopt emerging technology, we look at a huge range of opportunities and technology every year. As part of this, we started talking to Autodesk at their very impressive Pier Nine facility. During discussions, we learnt that Autodesk had been helping a European port get ships back in the water quicker and off the dry docks by printing bespoke new propellers on demand.
This got us thinking about some of the problems we were facing and how this could start and shape our new strategic approach to parts and stock. Although we recognize this is currently pushing boundaries, we're really excited about where this could take us and aligns with our innovation appetite. That conversation led us to Tom and we came for a visit.
TOM HEMANS: Kristian and his team came to visit us at the Birmingham Technology Centre. The Birmingham Technology Centre is one of four Autodesk technology centers around the world. We're based in the middle of the UK. The others can be found in Toronto, Boston, and as Kristian said earlier, San Francisco.
At the Birmingham Technology Centre, we focus on manufacturing and improving, validating and enabling Fusion workflows. We improve new features in the software. We validate our software, so customers have confidence that our software is thoroughly tested. And we enable colleagues and customers to use hardware.
The Birmingham Technology Centre has a range of hardware, from traditional manufacturing machines that will appear in our customers workshops to research and cutting edge equipment that allows us to experiment and implement the latest manufacturing technologies.
One of that these manufacturing technologies is hybrid manufacturing. The machine here is our hybrid machine, a Haas UMC1000SS with Meltio engine. It is a traditional five axis milling CNC machine with a metal additive head integrated. This machine allows us to 3D print metal. Welding wire is fed through the machine and melted by nine lasers onto a surface to build up a part or feature in layers.
But what is hybrid manufacturing? I'll take a brief moment to explain what it is. Hybrid manufacturing is a combination of additive and subtractive. In additive, or 3D printing, a part is built up in layers to produce a near net shape. Then, a subtractive or milling tool is used to remove material to make a finished part. Very cool.
But why would someone use hybrid manufacturing? What are the benefits? One benefit is you use less material, which means lower costs, and CO2 emissions are also reduced. If you look at the part on the left here, imagine that it was cut out of a block of material and how much of that material would have to be thrown away to get to that shape. Instead, we are only using material that we need to use to make the part.
Another benefit of hybrid manufacturing is, we can add material to existing parts. This means we can coat parts in stronger, more expensive materials only where we need them. It also allows us to repair parts by 3D printing features that have broken, back onto the part.
Another benefit of hybrid manufacturing is it's a cost effective alternative to low volume casting. The part on the right here is from another case study we worked on a few years ago. It is a prototype for an agricultural company. They were quoted $6,000 and 10 weeks to cast this one off part. We were able to make it using hybrid manufacturing for $600 in one week.
That was a brief overview of hybrid manufacturing. If you'd like to learn more, I can recommend this talk, Using Additive Manufacturing Technology via Fusion 360 and Inventor from AU 2022, where you can learn about the features that have been developed to ensure our customers are able to use this technology.
Now, back to the case study. Using hybrid manufacturing, we are going to repair the broken feature on this belt pulley. So let's go back into service and extend the operating life of the asset. But the first challenge is data. We have no data for this part, no CAD model, no drawing. So the first stage of this repair workflow is to create a digital model of the part.
So the repair workflow will start with scanning the palm. A laser scanner will be used to generate a mesh, so we have a digital representation of the part. The part can then be modeled. We can use this mesh to draw sketches from and create a CAD model of the part.
Once we have a digital CAD model, we can use this to program the 3D print. This is where we'll use additive manufacturing to build material back onto the part. The final stage of our repair workflow is machining. We can use conventional subtractive machining to mill the part back to size. So that's broadly what we did.
How did we actually do that? So let's start scanning. Using a laser scanner, we were able to take a physical model and then get a digital representation of that model. So here we a sample of a lion. But how we actually can use that on our belt pulley?
So here we have our original broken part. And using a [INAUDIBLE] laser scanner, we are able to make a scanned mesh part. We can then bring this mesh into Fusion and model a reverse engineered belt pulley. We now have a digital representation that we can program our machines off.
So still inside the Fusion, I can program the 3D print. On left side here, we have the tool path that is programmed on top of the broken feature. And the right hand side, we have a simulation of the bead of the toolpath as it is built up solely on the part. With the part programmed, it's time to go to the machine for the first attempt. And in the interest of openness, we can share the first attempt was a failure.
So as we built up material onto the part, you can see a large crack developed across the feature, as the printed material broke away from the original part. But we are a technology center, and we're not going to let something like this get in our way. So we need to do is go back to the drawing board and work out how can we resolve this little mishap.
The first we need to do is do a little bit of materials research. So fundamentally, what caused this crack? It was caused because we're printing different materials. So the belt pulley is cast iron, but the material we print on top of it is stainless steel wire.
So the first thing to check is, can this actually be done? Is this possible to do? So there's a bit of literature research to find the scientific paper, the exact scientific paper I was looking for, which tells me, yes, yes, this is possible. And with a few modifications to our process, we can then continue.
So our solution was to modify our printing parameters. So we're reducing the laser power and the speed at which we're printing. And we also needed to heat treat the belt pulley to remove the thermal stresses from the first print.
So now it's time for the second attempt. So one of the first things we need to think about when we're putting a part on the machine is, how are we actually going to hold it? So for that, we need a custom fixture. This fixture, you can see on the left here, was made up of jaws, which were machined to match the internal bore of the belt pulley and some clamps to hold the belt pulley down from above. You can see on the right hand side how we are holding that part inside the machine.
So the part has been heat treated. It's been programmed. It's held in machine. Now it is time to actually add material back to the part. No, it's not that easy go back. So now the part is held in the machine, it is time to start the process of hybrid manufacturing.
So the first process is to remove the broken feature, where we use the subtractive tools on the machine to mill the top face back down to a nice flat surface, for which we can then print on. We can then start the actual 3D printing of the part.
So the left hand side here, we have a time lapse video of the part printing. So every time you see the bright light, that is when the lasers are melting the wire. So each layer here, each layer took about 15 minutes to print. And overall, the part took about 12 hours to print this entire feature on the right hand side.
But what of the [INAUDIBLE], it was all successfully built up. So great, we've got our part. We've got material built back onto it. Now we need to machine it back to size. So on the same machine, in the same setup, we don't have to change anything with the part. You don't have to move it. We can then run our subtractive toolpaths to machine the vertical profile of the part, to machine that to size.
And then we had to move the part onto another five axis machine, where we can machine the grooves, as we get the parts towards back to its original state. And after the part's machined there, we have our fully repaired part. So this part is now ready to go back to Northumbrian Water, for them to fit it onto another system, to see can this part go back into use, and can they extend the operating life of this asset? So, the benefits.
KRISTIAN HAAGENSEN: So, the benefits. I sat with Tom and worked out the numbers in a broad sense. So the first cost we had was for scanning. Next cost was modeling. Then, we had our 3D printing. And then finally, our machining costs. And that totaled in at $2,390. Now add in the labor cost, this comes in-- next slide, please-- at just over 12k for the repair.
Now that seems a lot. But when you look at the worst case scenario of 40 weeks, at $2,000 a day, it becomes just a fraction. Clearly, this is an extreme. But even if we just manufacture a handful of parts that have known long lead in times and high operational temporary costs, it does make a big difference to that bottom line.
TOM HEMANS: So that was the cost benefits. You also have the data benefits. So once you've done the scanning and modeling, you have a CAD model, which you can then use to create drawings of. So if Kristian knows that this part is always problematic and his engineers are constantly having to repair and replace it, rather than repairing each one, he now has a model which he can then get sent off and have a batch of them made, so they will be ready on the shelf for next time this part fails.
KRISTIAN HAAGENSEN: We're really pleased with the work that we've done with Tom and the potential this project has and how it may help us go in the future. As I said earlier, we're a company, and we've got innovation within our DNA.
And I also want to mention that we have an international innovation festival every year, where we take our biggest problems and spend a week with some of the best companies, academia, customers, as well as our own SMEs, to come up with a game changing technology and ideas. We've achieved so much from these festivals, even influenced UK government strategy with our National Underground Register. So scan the QR code, and come and join us in July next year and see we're up to. Thanks for listening.
TOM HEMANS: Yeah. And I hope you agree that this case study shows that technology is out there to help people across industries. And if you'd like to get involved with us, and maybe you have a part yourself or work for yourself that you'd be interested in, please come and visit the Birmingham Technology Centre. Scan the QR code. Come over here. Let's see how we can collaborate. Thank you very much for listening.
Downloads
Tags
Product | |
Industries | |
Topics |