Impact of Industry 4.0 in the Rubber Industry

Janifha Evangeline

According to a recent report, India is the 3rd largest rubber producer & 4th largest natural rubber consumer in the world. While the manufacturing capacity of rubber in India is around 90000 tons this is a key industry in the Indian economy with an annual turnover of around 12000 crores. If we have a closer look at the rubber industry there are around six thousand firms with 30 large units, five thousand six hundred small-scale companies, and three hundred medium-scale companies.

Challenges faced by the rubber industry

Some of the challenges faced by the rubber industry include minimizing energy losses, achieving high performance, manufacturing the best quality products, ensuring operational and environmental safety, improving operational inefficiencies, meeting supply chain demands, on-time delivery of operational demands, machine breakdown time, reducing uncertain raw material costs, connecting and capturing data from machines on a single platform and quality issues.

“India being a price sensitive market, most of the clients are looking to increase their bottom line by efficiently managing their operational cost. This creates a challenge for the clients who are looking for molded rubber components with a perfect price and the quality ratio,” says Cyril Varghese, CEO & Co-Founder, Elvee Rubber.

Today in order to address the various challenges that arise in the rubber industry related to pricing and quality issues it is important for clients to partner with competent manufacturers who will offer products that meet the international standard quality at the most effective pricing. This is where Elvee Rubber a company offering custom rubber products comes into the picture. Elvee Rubber uses the best rubber materials in the country & provides competitive pricing on all molded rubber products while its quality management system is compliant that is able to meet the highest quality standards.

Emerging business demands in the rubber industry

Engaged in the manufacturing & selling of “Off-

Highway Tyres” is Balkrishna Industries Limited. The product is used in various specialist segments that include agricultural, earthmovers, industrial and construction, and many other industries.

While automation is one of the rapidly developing sectors in the Rubber Industry, most manufacturers are not aware of how and what kind of impact is going to make in the industry. Since around 1.7 million industrial robots are said to be introduced into the worldwide market in the near future, the technology is going to enable enterprises to collect much more data, therefore, what is the best way to utilize this data, improve measures, support quality and help increment benefit? This is where Industrial IoT comes into play.

Advantages of implementing IIoT in the rubber industry

Industrial IoT or Industry 4.0 plays a significant role in offering the required solution to the industries by bringing running systems online as well as capturing the parameters from the machine. The industrial IoT addresses various aspects. These comprise the ecological, social as well as economic aspects of sustainable value creation for manufacturers. Therefore, there is scope for huge productivity enhancement which can be achieved through greater IoT deployment.

Some of the benefits or advantages of implementing IIoT in the rubber industry include efficient & effective production management, Complete process traceability, and transparency, a completed automated system, track use of consumables, direct & indirect material availability, and long batch-wise production data.

The most important benefits include tracking & reduce rejection losses, determining the mechanical properties of rubber after post-curing, root cause analysis from the captured data in order to resolve performance and quality issues, observing the condition & performance of vulcanization machines & other machines, increasing asset life & overall performance & improvement in product quality.

By leveraging Industry 4.0 we will be able to obtain the reports such as daily production reports, plan versus actual production, cycle-wise upper & lower die temperature log report, temperature log & pressure logs, machine versus cycle log, rejection reports, number of cycles run reports, cycle wise curing time log report & cycle wise hydraulic pressure log reports.

The road ahead

“There has been a rapid increase in rubber utilization in recent years due to its utility, longevity, and sustainability. Extruded and molded rubber components have taken a large place in different manufacturing sectors and one of them is automobiles. Customers of these sectors are very quality conscious and demand a steady supply of products with desired quality,” says G Praagaran, Director, Sai Rubber Industries.

Although industrial rubber products are virtually used in almost every sector its dominance is in the automotive sector. Furthermore, the specialty product manufacturers spend more than the industry average time on the detailed R&D in the rubber industry for making their rubber products stand out in the market. Moving ahead, the rubber market size is anticipated to reach USD 51.21 billion by 2027.