When Even The Brick Became Smart
The Wienerberger brick factory in Kunigal (Karnataka) makes the Porotherm smart brick, which is roughly 9 times the size of an average brick.It has a hollow form factor that helps pass air and is lightweight. The factory is fully automated, with robotic arms handling every stage of the process, leading to minimum wastage. Even the kiln is computerized, using coal dust. The factory can work 24X7 365. Wienerberger Global CEO Christof Domenig talks about the technology involved
Robots and digital tools
We don’t say we have to digitise everything or do Artificial Intelligence. Certain things work for us, we have to find those which have certain scalability.More than Industry 4.0, we have to concentrate on 2.0. Of course there’s automatization. Everything that handles heavy loads is robotized in Europe and no new factory is built with mechanical or physical labour, plants are retrofitted accordingly. In prefabrication, it’s a much faster and forward thinking technology thanks to brick robots. You come with a truck on site, you feed the bricks in and if there’s cut needed to do, that is done. They take brick by brick and glue them together. It’s an amazing story and it’s so fastmore precise. You take out a lot of manual labour and come out with affordable walling solutions.
The factory doesn’t just have robots. The sensors are all connected. With all the incoming data points there is a certain self-learning and steering which is more precise and better than before. It helps us in maintaining the exact moisture content required and the right amount of energy during a drying process. In these cases, even being off 2%, which doesn’t sound much, may have a huge impact.
It is important for us to connect the logistics chain from production planning out to delivery on site in time and here digital tools help us. We also do a lot of digital prototyping and 3D printing for spare parts and modelling. What is interesting is what we do with digital tooling. We do the whole training process and manuals of machines with glasses and Virtual Reality which help you repair machines. We use Google Maps and take drone shots of a roof that has to be tiled and other work. This is translated into an offer with all the details connected to the merchants for shipping. This streamlines the process and saves a lot of time.
Hackathons and digital twins
We work with startups. We do hackathons. A new way of repair maintenance that came out of one of these hackathons. We do innovation days. We constantly look at new materials and new composition of raw materials. A startup from Vietnam used biomass palm leaves with an enzyme to make a new type of brick. We fine-tuned our robotic brick layers also through these processes. It came from the shipping industry. They basically load and unload from the ship to the harbour. We used that to that in the brick process by miniaturising it.
We build digital models of factories and try out certain processes before we gointo the real world. We use digital twins for the process simulation. We understand potential weaknesses and it helps out how to take out excessive weight and so on. Digital twins help us in checking how to maintain the factory over its lifetime. There are interesting learnings. We immediately see where certain things might go wrong. We are at the beginning of such things but the learnings are quite stunning.