At its plant in Lüchow, Lower Saxony, SKF GmbH produces various rolling bearing products. For decades, equipment and services from AICHELIN have been used for the heat treatment that takes place here. Last year, AICHELIN was commissioned with the comprehensive modernization of five roller hearth furnaces. After the plants were successfully recommissioned at the end of December 2022, SKF has fully achieved its project goals: to ensure production reliability and significantly increase productivity.
The reason for the current plant modernization was the aging Siemens PLC S5 electronic control system and the resulting need to upgrade to a fail-safe Simatic S7-1500. The company decided to combine the necessary control system upgrade with other plant retrofits and modernizations.
Increased productivity and flexibility
AICHELIN designed a new stacking gantry together with the SKF project team and an external partner to increase part throughput in the heat treatment facilities. This stacking gantry is being used for the first time at SKF and now enables the customer to run two to a maximum of three layers of rolling bearings in a single heat treatment process instead of the previous single-layer process.
In addition to expanding production capacity, this will also enable SKF to respond more flexibly to additional demand in the future and, above all, to utilize the capacity of the plants in a much more energy-efficient manner. In addition, FOCOS 4.0, AICHELIN's Industry 4.0 application for monitoring and quality verification of process values, has been newly integrated.
Organization of the project
The project planning and implementation of all trades was transferred from SKF to AICHELIN Service at an early stage. The decisive aspect here was to obtain 'everything from a single source' from the industrial furnace manufacturer. AICHELIN Service acted as general contractor and was responsible for the overall project management as well as the execution of the services of all partners and subcontractors involved.
The general conditions were challenging for the project partners. Originally, the project was scheduled to run from November 2021 to June 2022 and was considered time-critical because production reliability had to be ensured in parallel. The plants were to be converted step by step one after the other. However, due to the supply bottlenecks along the supply chain, which are generally widespread in the market, there were delays of several months in the delivery of various parts. This critical situation was nevertheless mastered.
Successful cooperation
"Once again, we worked together with AICHELIN Service in a very constructive and cooperative manner. We were able to bridge the delivery bottlenecks through high flexibility on both sides and the use of alternative suppliers, also from our SKF network. It is crucial to communicate openly and purposefully in such phases," explains the project manager in the Production Support & Heat Treatment division of SKF GmbH.
The competitiveness of SKF's Lüchow site has been significantly strengthened by increasing its productivity in the heat treatment sector. SKF is already in talks with AICHELIN Service for further plant upgrades, including ensuring and increasing plant safety.
