On September 19, the grand launch ceremony of MESNAC’s TPRO-S Uni-stageThree-drum TBR Tire Building Machine was held in Shanghai, China. TPRO-S has the highest daily outcome compared to other similar models worldwide. Productivity was increased by 40% compared with other traditional machines, and helps customers increase revenue by about 30 million RMB each year. Once released, TPRO-S gained eight orders during one day, creating a new record for MESNAC product sales.
MESNAC started to develop the very first Two-drum TBR Tire Building Machine in 2002. Up to now there have been 5 generations of TBR Tire Building Machine and MESNAC has produced altogether 1100 units of them. Based on above achievements and with 32 experts’ participation, MESNAC TBR team successfully developed this smart building machine -- TPRO-S -- with 5 core technologies, 25 technical patents, and 37 technical innovations after two years of research and developments, which is a creative invention in China, and advanced level in the world.
Wu shoutao, General Manager of TBR & OTR Tire Building Machine Division, said that with the development of society and tire industry, the market has increasingly higher requirements for tire building quality, tailored building technology, productivity, and performance price ratio. In response to such needs, MESNAC puts forward TPRO-S with its focus on improving tire quality. Research and development team of MESNAC spent a lot of time in studying the tire production process, research tire dynamic balance and uniformity. After the team’s good understanding of tire production, they started to research and design Tire Building Machine. The measured data shows that the team has achieved the expected results. Compared with ZCX3, MESNAC TPRO-S is expected to become the next popular product in the market of tire building.
Specifically, the TPRO-S model has achieved leap-forward improvements in four aspects in response to relative market demands. Tire quality has been improved and uniformity and dynamic is increased by more than 15%. Focusing on the positioning precision of each semi-finished parts in tire production and how to maintain the roundness of the tires during the building process, TPRO-S has mainly solved the problem of how to improve the dynamic balance and uniformity in tire shaping process. In contrast to previous generation tire building machine, dynamic balance result has increased by 20% and uniformity by 15%, as TPRO-S can ensure the quality of every tire to conform to those criteria, including accurate conveying, precise lamination, quality joint, accurate delivery, and solid rolling pressure, in the process of tire building.
Besides, the reliability of the equipment has been improved to the extent that no need to do any maintenance in six months. Combined with the past manufacturing practice, MESNAC has developed and delivered 174 enterprise standards in 10 major fields of tire building machine, covering every procedure in the life cycle of basic norms of research and development, model selecting, processing, installation and commissioning. The size of a bolt, operating conditions, anti-loosening measures, tightening torque, and labeling, all have standards to follow in order to be standardized and refined and to improve product quality and reliability in every detail, which makes the maintenance cycle of equipment extend to more than six months and the longest single maintenance time less than 6 hours.
Moreover, Productivity has been improved, resulting in a high level daily output in the world. Through the analysis of each step in the tire building process, using the motion control principle based on the time axis, analyzing and optimizing the machine action and the manual operation time, the single cycling time of three-drum tire building machine has been reduced to less than 150 seconds. At the same time, through the application of intelligent tooling to effectively solve the various sizes with small batch production in tire factories, TPRO-S has significantly reduced the time in size change and improved the whole productivity in tire factories, resulting in the realization of 20 minutes with 2 people with same inch and 40 minutes with 4 people with different sizes.
Finally, operating costs have been dramatically reduced and equipment quantity can be reduced by 30%. TPRO-S, as an important part of the future smart factory, has comprehensively considered the plant operation. Compared with the old model, the same number of equipment in the case of TPRO-S can increase productivity by more than 30%. And the reduction in the number of operators bring in reduction in labor costs. As a result, a single TPRO-S equipment can create an annual overall benefit, namely productivity improvement and labor reduction, of more than 3 million RMB. If the annual production capacity is set to 2 million tires, the demands for TPRO-S model can reduce by 30% compared with the demands for traditional model.
At the end of the meeting, Wu shoutao expressed that MESNAC not only provides TPRO-S, but also has the ability to deliver integrated solution of smart building workshop which consists of overall solution, capacity planning, centralized control center, automatic logistics, MES, and cloud platform. Besides, taking the cost of smart building workshop as an example, Wu shoutao analyzed the economic benefits brought by improving in tire enterprise capacity and reducing in labor costs. Therefore, taking all the factors into consideration, such as tire building quality, equipment reliability, productivity, and investment benefit, nowadays TPRO-S building machine is going to be the optimal choice for tire enterprises.
