McNeil & NRM Inc, are two well-established names in the history of tire curing presses who combined in 1992. Now known as McNeil & NRM, the company has its technology base in Akron, Ohio and a high-quality manufacturing plant in Bucharest, Romania.
The AUTOLOK curing press is part of a family of presses whose designs are regularly updated to maintain cutting edge technology in the 46 to 67-in. press size range.
While the global tire market has experienced significant growth over the years, the industry has undergone several changes lately that are driving a re-focus of the technology. These include e-Mobility and autonomous driving. Competitive tire production needs to be highly flexible and react quickly to volatile market developments, while also meeting today’s high standards of quality, safety, and environmental impact issues. Digitalization helps manufacturers remain competitive, as it provides heavy machine builders significantly increased flexibility in design protocols.
In the Siemens strategy, digital twins of the product, the production process, and the production facilities, as well as the product’s in-plant performance, are linked to a single integrated data model in the cloud. This creates a complete picture of the manufacturing landscape and a closed-loop through the digital world. It enables continuous improvements for the best possible results, based on actual production and performance data feedback. The digital twin of a tire press helps turn an innovative design into a successful new machine by providing design, simulation, and verification, all in the digital environment. The entire production process is planned, simulated and optimized under virtual working conditions, before the press build starts. Furthermore, prototyping efforts are reduced considerably, machines can be optimized during development and machine operators can be trained, long before a machine is actually commissioned.
Using the digital twin technology from Siemens, McNeil & NRM can predict the operation of the press and simulate its actual running. The Siemens Mechatronics Concept Designer (MCD) provides the ability to achieve virtual commissioning. Virtual commissioning based on “software in the loop” is based on the TIA Portal, PLCSIM Advanced and the Mechatronics Concept Designer. This is a crucial factor in reducing commissioning times in the real world and preventing costly machine crashes. In addition, McNeil & NRM will be working on applying NX software and Mechatronics Concept Designer tools to accelerate the sharing of information between its mechanical design and control design teams to improve the efficiency of the machine development process. Going forward, mechanical design changes and enhancements will be replicated in the virtual world to provide operational data and design feedback to bring innovations to the production of tires.
Performance and maintenance data from production equipment and entire production lines will be captured and analyzed using Mindsphere, the Siemens cloud-based open IoT system. Mindsphere provides analytics and connectivity capabilities, developer tools, applications, and services to evaluate and utilize all available data in a meaningful way for the machine builder and end-user alike.
Addressing the use of the digital twin provided to McNeil & NRM, Bill Henderson, the head of the U.S. tire industry group for Siemens, notes, “This collaboration marks a deeper involvement for our company in the tire business. Both the digital twin and our Mindsphere data gathering and information management tools will enable McNeil & NRM, as well as others in the industry supply chain, to anticipate changes in equipment configuration and be proactive in providing high productivity and efficiency to the tire manufacturing community worldwide.”
Ed Bailey, Vice President of Engineering & Development at McNeil & NRM, also notes, “The Siemens and McNeil & NRM collaboration to create the digital twin of our 63-in. curing press provides an essential foundation for our product development roadmap. This twin is a prerequisite to accelerate all dimensions of development and collaboration with our customers, including software development, virtual commissioning, training, and press optimization. Further development can enable our customers to virtualize tire production machine cells, complete lines and ultimately the entire plant.”