Rubber/Tyres

In the Indian Automobile market there is an ever-growing need for tyres. MELSS, by leveraging on its intrinsic industry expertise and being adept with the latest industry practices, is an ideal partner to manufacturers in the Rubber and Tyre Industry.

Solutions for Rubber/Tyre Industry

With many years of experience in delivering Batching Systems, MELSS is ideally placed to partner our customers in Automatic Weighing and Batching Projects.

Additionally, our expertise in Barcode & RFID Tracking allows MELSS to devise customised solutions for Raw Material, Finished Goods and Manufacturing Traceability.

We are also able to offer a variety of customized software solutions in the areas of:

• Material Storage and Handling
• Automatic Trolley for material collection
• Recipe Management Systems
• PLC and SCADA Programming

The composition of the rubber compound varies within a single tyre whose different layers and parts need different levels of flexibility, resistance and grip properties. Air-tight rubber is used for the inner tube to which a ply made of textile sheet is applied to reinforce it. 2 high-resistance metal cable loops are then applied to hold the tyre at the rim. Sidewall, made of flexible and resistant rubber, is applied to protect the tyre from lateral damage. Metal-reinforced plies are applied to the top. Finally the tread is fitted which makes contact with the ground when the vehicle is moving or is stationary. This is then placed in a curing bowl where a hot liquid is injected, firming up all the layers as a single unit, with the temperature causing vulcanisation too. The rubber changes state from plastic to elastic and is tested for quality before being rolled out for delivery.

Tyre manufacturing uses various raw materials in addition to natural or synthetic rubber, such as carbon black, oil, steel winding and sulphur. These raw materials are scanned for their batch numbers and bar-coded before storing raw rubber in gondolas, carbon black in large carbon silos and other chemicals in eva bags. 

Different grades of tyres require different ratios of the raw materials. The Goods Received Note (GRN) is generated and barcode labels are fixed on the raw material bags/containers. The raw materials are released against production order after confirming shelf-life on a first-in-first-out (fifo) basis. 

The traceability system issues alerts for expired shelf-life products and these raw materials are not allowed to proceed to production. Based on the recipe, the carbon black and the chemicals are fed into mixers in the required proportions. 

The operator starts the production and tags the raw materials with a batch number. In the output area, each of the mixer bags is barcoded and placed on skids and each batch is weighed by automatic weighing machines. 

Only after the required ageing is the mixer bag moved to the next process where sulphur is added to create the final mixing compound which will be used in subsequent stages using preparatory machines such as extruders and calendering machines. At each stage, the input component is scanned, and a barcode is affixed on the material handling equipment. 

The material now moves to the next stage of tyre building machines to produce ‘green tyres’ on which a barcode is affixed. This is again weighed using automatic weighing machines before going into the next stage of curing after which the output tyre is barcoded using vulcanised barcode labels. 

These output tyres are then analysed for defects, and minor defects are moved into a repair process but major defects are segregated as scrap which is also weighed and logged for the reason of defect and sent to the stakeholders for analysis. 

Proper tagging at various stages right from the storage of raw materials to the batch number of the finished product creates a healthy system for traceability. The scrap is also tagged.