Productivity Improvement Of Autoclave Equipment Used For Vulcanization Of Rubber Coated Rolls

Abstract

Rubber coated rolls are primary requirement for industries such as Textiles, Paper mills, Automatic transfer lines for handling dangerous compounds etc. as they are in continuous operation under specific environment. For such applications vast variety of rubber coated rolls are available. One of the main requirements from these industries is the hardness of the rubber coated rolls which depends on the application and working environment. To achieve that specific hardness of the rubber compound various of processes are done on it. Vulcanization of these rubber coated rolls is one of the main process, which imparts hardness to the soft rubber. The hardness value depends upon the rubber compound and the process parameters. In a rubber manufacturing industries productivity is the major problems due to the long processing time of rubber vulcanization. To vulcanize the rubber autoclave equipment is used which is often found to be under-utilized due to varying size of rubber rolls and lack of proper roll arrangement system on the trolley type structure. A modular structure has been conceptually designed. Analytical design and FE analysis have been carried out for a safe design with F.O.S. of 2. A model with roll arrangement is developed and it is observed that the space utilization is almost improved by 100%. This will reduce the production cost and thereby the overall productivity of the company can be improved. A program has been developed using Visual Basic software which will provide the roll arrangement on a modular trolley structure to obtain optimum space utilization.