 Hello everyone, my name is Aram Ovanissian and my capstone project is optimization of copper up working newscasting technology my supervisor is Dr. Hrecha Kocharian and Moving on to the importance of copper So copper is used in various industries starting from electrical power transmission lines Microelectronics heating and cooling systems as well as hydraulic systems and corrosive environments The motivation of this paper was maximization of production output of copper wire for NSLLC which provided with their financial support and their machinery for this project and Also as Armenia has a lot of copper mines which are not processing the Copper very effectively this project may help the processing in Armenia for copper material So copper continuous casting technology features two different Technologies one is the downward casting technology while the other one is the upward casting technology Which we actually used for the project while the similarities between these projects are very a Lot of them There are severe differences between them for example downward casting technology uses secondary cooling and primary cooling and secondary cooling while upward casting technology uses only primary cooling Also downward casting technology is widely used for casting large diameter Metal billets while upward casting technology is only used for small diameter rods and tubes one Significant process which I would like to discuss is wire drawing process which involves reducing Copper rods from initial diameter of 8 millimeters to 1.78 millimeters or down to 0.3 millimeters This is one of the most significant reasons why we need optimization of the copper production process because Poor copper rod quality may affect the wire drawing process and the further processing may be impossible So here you can see the machinery used for the experimental part of this Research This is the casting machine and you can see the heat exchanger assembly here Which features a steel heat exchanger graphic mold which are used and the insulating cup Additionally, we use several other Components which I would like to mention we also used water chiller unit for cooling down the machine because the machine features an induction electromagnetic induction heating system and it requires cooling and as well also heat exchanger consumes the heat from the copper melt by the cooled water we also use silicon carbide crucibles graphite mold for 8 millimeter copper rod and we also use silicon carbide thermocouple as Conventional thermocouples do not withstand temperature of 1200 degrees Celsius and we use graph of graphite powder which is mainly used for copper melt degasing and prevention of copper oxidation so here are the out here is the outline of the Process so we start with the induction heating then we go on with the gazing process using the copper power or powder Then goes the copper casting and road winding So moving on to the casting parameters that we used for this experiment There are various parameters that affect this process such as the super heat modulus of copper melt the temperature of cooling water water flow rate and initial copper use for casting and So on but we will discuss only the casting parameters which refer to the withdrawal unit unit as this is the most Significant part in this process it consists of the casting speed which is the linear speed of casting the Road the pull distance which is the step of a single cycle Completed by the machine and the post time is the difference between two cycles We for accurate results We tried to make the cast samples as many as possible and for this reason we made ten casts and As you can see here the pull distance and interval time were Maintain constant for the first four samples while the casting speed was Changed for them and similar picture can be noticed from for the cast from five to ten So moving on to the results when we cast the copper rods without any We noticed that the color of the copper rods differed according to their parameters and I brought several copper rods to Make that more visual as you can see here I brought the cast number one five and seven and the differences between these rods are significant You can notice that there is Difference in their oxide layer one is thicker and the other one are not so significant So the other thing that we noticed the test number eight failed because of Insignificant insufficient cooling of the inside the mold because the interval time that we set of zero point one second was insufficient for the copper to see the solidify We used two methods for examining the copper specimen The first one was crystallography and the second method was three point bending a mechanical test to determine the Young's modulus x-ray diffraction test was mainly to Clarified to verify the FCC structure of copper lattice and the other goal was to find the average crystallite size for each specimen separately We can see here the x-ray diffraction patterns and as you can see here. We have five distinct peaks Each corresponding to FCC structure of copper lattice Additionally, we can't find any other peaks corresponding to any impurities or copper oxides inside the copper This means that the copper casts are where Solidified very Very good. So the next step was Estimating the crystallite size by Scherer's equation and the results were plotted according to Different changing parameters as you can see here There is a slight change in the crystallite size a negative correlation for the casting speed Well for the pull distance and then interval time make it make we can see that the correlation is mostly positive but due to a small amount of Specimen further investigations are required here The next step was the mechanical test setup as I mentioned earlier. We made a three-point bending test because we lacked a Machinery to complete a tensile testing so we used Young's modulus formula for three point bending and And the results were again plotted to find the correlation between the casting parameters and the Young's modulus here. We can see that Young's modulus versus casting speed is mostly linear So increasing casting speed also results in Young's modulus increase, which is not very good for a while drawing process Similar picture is for the pull distance while the difference is that the function is mostly logarithmic Here we can see that there is a Significant jump between the first and the second points and then we reach a certain plateau after which the parameters do not The Young's modulus do not change at all Similarly for interval time we get the Exponential decrease for all these pessimists tested here. You can see the cast number eight, which also failed and it was the most Hard material that we use and Then we go to an exponential decay and reach a plateau again as the other in the in the other case For each of the earlier mentioned graphs we describe the equation of Young's modulus using these functions and These functions are our main Objective functions that are going to be used for the constraint optimization later on Here you can see the daily output equation of the casting machine, which we derived. It depends on the pull distance interval time and casting speed here V stands for volume of cast copper rod per shift working shift and Here you can see our objective functions and constraints for the constraint with optimization problem The first one is the reciprocal of our Production output equation while F2 F3 and F4 correspond to each of the casting parameter equations that we derived earlier Here are constraints which we used where Corresponding to the range of the values that we changed for each of the parameters here is the interval time as you can see the Minimum point is 0.1 seconds, but as we know that as a 0.1 parameter failed to Work we changed the initial constraints to 0.3 seconds, which is more viable for Physical testing and also mean we maintain the Young's modulus below 270 mega Pascal's which is the appropriate value for while drawing process to take place so we also derived the Pareto front for the constraint optimization and The results that we plotted using MATLAB software were as follows the final casting parameters that would Result in maximum output while maintaining Young's modulus under 270 mega Pascal's our tool distance of 24 millimeters interval time of 0.35 seconds and Speed of 28.5 millimeters per second This will result in estimated daily output of 224 kilograms of copper rod daily with a single casting head, but since the machine our Features to casting that we can double the output and our estimated Daily output will be around 450 kilograms So these results were sent to the production manager for investigation and for more physical Results to be shown and it is considered as a my future work to Make sure that these parameters will help the while drawing process to be successful Here are my acknowledgements. I would like to thank my supervisor dr. Hatch actually coach Iran his Expertise in such fields such as material science and thermodynamics Were very sufficient for me to complete this project. I would like to express my sincere thanks to the NS LLC for providing their machinery and Financing me in this project as well as I would thank my friends Barton higher up a talent chemical physics institute which helped me with the XRD result test And I would also like to have thank our man also John who helped me with mechanical specimen preparation and Here are my references Thank you Before starting this project the company with whom you Collaborated for making provided the machinery and everything. What were the parameters that they use before me? I Guess well, it's a factory that operates and they have some parameters. Yes, actually. I'm working in this factory and this factory Assigned me to find suitable casting machinery for them and I found it I imported the machinery made the physical setup the electrical circuitry and After which I started working on the optimization of the production. So this was my Yes, yes About getting This really works in practical way Do you have any rough estimate on how much it would cost to produce a unit weight Well, the main goal was not to find the unit price but rather Maximizing the output because these copper rods which are used in cable manufacturing They are going through a lot of processes are almost like six processes to be processed further and It's not very Significant to calculate the price of the product to be processed Yes, it reduces unit price Where's it? Well, this machine is supposed to work 24 7 so it's the only way to maximize the