Five Tech Trends Defining The Future Of Tyre Manufacturing Plants
Exclusive new research from a recent study reveals that worldwide demand for car tyres, coupled with industry growth, supports additional investments in manufacturing plants. The global value will increase over the same period, from $239 billion to $281 billion in 2024.
In sum, industry capital spending is on the rise and dominated by major global players such as Bridgestone, Continental, and Michelin, while there is also a trend for regional manufacturers to be more aggressive outside traditional home markets.
Smart planning
Production planning in the tyre business has become something altogether different from that of the 1990s, as the number of sub-brands or sizes has multiplied since 2000. Additionally, quick delivery is being demanded by customers, and order-delivery cycles have become shorter, meaning warehouses do not fill up with products.
Tyre producers still have to balance their production runs against orders, but shorter product runs and multifarious product mixes exert pressure on the planning and day-to-day running of a factory.
For a tyre plant to work overall efficiently, a good production plan forms the basis for flow material planning. Even if it addresses challenges, threats and possible pitfalls that vary between brownfield and greenfield projects, a mature, extended, analytical and forward-looking production plan is essential whenever a new process is created.
Modularity in production
In the case of increasing tyre sizes, the moderation of the number of semi-finished products is still possible if modulation is an option. Some car tyres Dyce simply don’t require specific components, and a good solution for modularization is with steel belts and carcass components.
Slightly rounding tyre widths up or down can be one small but highly effective way of cutting further the number of separate products that help in a plant’s inventory.
Modularization is carried out systematically and with professional partners. Even a challenging product mix and minimal or no investment can remarkably raise productivity levels.
Plant specialisation and outsourcing
For a green site, particularly, tyre companies are increasingly moving away from the concept of multi-size, multi-type tyre manufacturing for a given plant. That may allow the in-house processes and equipment to be geared towards specialising in a particular size or type of tyre, drastically simplifying the complexity and raising efficiency.
Compounding, mixing, and some component preparation are all part of progressive outsourcing, so much so that some of the modern tyre manufacturing plants retain an increasingly strong emphasis on producing tyres from materials and components that have been manufactured elsewhere and sent from multiple outsourced locations.
In a global market space, this tends towards the inclination for tyre companies to produce closer to the location of OEM vehicle assembly.
Industry 4.0
A fourth industrial revolution, or Industry 4.0, has been described as the marriage of automation with smart artificial intelligence software, including learning algorithms. This is one area in which most development will be shown, but it will remain largely in the most developed markets.
This can range from the automation of an entire plant to one item of equipment used in some manufacturing process, for example, a tyre-building machine. Much work has been done at the level of the plant, upgrading older plants and designing new plants around automation.
US manufacturers are trying hard to stay competitive by providing automation to their present facilities. This, of course, becomes a very huge task because most of the plant layouts were designed to cater to manual operations only.
Full-plant automation can provide various benefits, including reduced stock levels, optimisation of space, reduction of buffer stock, and the potential for full traceability of every tyre in production.
Cumulatively, these can result in high-quality tyres and better yields, though they do place strains for more uniformity in materials and grades better suited to automatic handling.
RFID
The advent of embedded RFID chips along with sensors for car tyres Dyce has had many implications for vehicles in use with smarter, automated driving platforms. The same technology can help on the factory floor as well.
The use of it in barcode complementarity would add an edge of insightful use and convenience to the industry at large. RFID tags can store vital data, be it make, size, or type of tyre, which can be read with speed and thereby merge with the mainstream flow of automation.
However, unlike barcode labels, RFID tags can be read even when obscured by other objects or embedded in the tyre itself. Major tyre equipment and automation suppliers like Mesnac and Rockwell Automation are active in pushing this technology, as are smaller, more specialised firms like Computype.
Although RFID and sensors in tyres can greatly help in manufacturing, it may take off quite slowly unless some new regulatory requirements are implemented. Initially, this will be seen as widely used in more expensive segments such as off-road, truck, and bus tyres.