VMI: Tire technology upgrades for efficient, sustainable manufacturing

STOW, Ohio—Harm Voortman looks at tire manufacturing from a different perspective than most.

The CEO of tire machinery maker VMI Group sees an industry where producers are making an excellent product in a highly efficient way.

There are factories around the world manufacturing 20,000, 30,000, even up to 70,000 tires a day. Materials come in, tires are produced and then shipped to customers, and the products are good.

But he also sees an industry in need of new, better technology so that tire factories can cope with an ever-evolving landscape.

"If you look at a modern tire factory, you see that the efficiency levels are really excellent compared to other industries," Voortman told attendees of the VMI Technology Day, conducted May 5 at its U.S. service site in Stow. "So you could say, what is wrong—and why change?"

The reason: the tire market is changing and tire producers must keep up. The number of tire types and sizes is growing exponentially, so that means manufacturers are dealing with increasingly shorter production lots.

And that means a lot of changeovers and machines that are standing still.

Most of today's tire factories are designed to be efficient while making large volumes of the sames types of tires.

"In order to cope with that, you make a lot of materials and stock that. You prep components and you stock them, make various compounds. You stock them. You produce tires and you stock the tires," he said.

"That is a way to overcome a little bit of this need for flexibility. But it leads to a lot of money in materials that are on the floor. Work in progress. And a lot in storage."

That is where VMI comes in, according to Voortman.

As the leading producer of tire production equipment, he said, the Epe, Netherlands-based company has the engineering muscle and research and development programs to give tire manufacturers the innovations they need going forward.

In short, that means providing tire building technology that delivers consistently high quality, gives a wide berth of flexibility, is efficient and productive, and also lowers environmental impact with processes that have less scrap and use less energy.

"There is a need for a really different type of environment for production," Voortman said. "It is quite difficult to imagine with this enormous footprint that we have in a plant ... that we can change that overnight. That's really impossible."

He suggested tire manufacturers look at their existing operations and replace things here and there that can help either on the sustainability side, or on the efficiency side in terms of flexibility.

Voortman and Sander Jacobs, sales director for VMI's tire unit, went into some details with Technology Day attendees on some of their most recent technology introductions. That includes the UNIXX steel belt maker, introduced during this year's Tire Technology Expo, and its Revolute bead apex production system, unveiled at the same show last year.

VMI said the UNIXX Belt Maker—part of the VMI UNIXX technology platform—is best suited for hands-off, eyes-off production. Scrap and waste from angle and compound changes are reduced because of the limited width of the extruded strip.

It offers an efficient extrusion and cutting process, reduced waste and scrap, lower energy consumption and minimum operator involvement, which the firm said brings a lower overall cost per produced square meter of belt compared to the traditional belt making process.

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In addition, the new belt maker allows for production of thinner belts to reduce tire weight and rolling resistance without compromising tire performance, thus bringing lower fuel consumption and CO2 emission levels.

"It's really a game-changing technology for that market, enabling you to make a consistent, high-quality product offering you flexibility and higher productivity," Jacobs said.

Voortman said the UNIXX Belt Maker builds on past innovative solutions offered in the UNIXX technology platform, following upgrades in gear pump technology, strip-winding solutions and flexible slab cutting.

Jacobs also touched on the benefits offered by VMI's Revolute bead apex production system. This process is designed to complement VMI's existing bead apexing technology, increases production time per item, opens up new options for tire design and performance, and delivers higher levels of automation.

"Like the belt maker, we can deploy our hands-off, eyes-off production, which is a recipe-controlled operation," he said. "You have no operator intervention in the machine."

Each machine can make up to 20,000 bead apexes a day, Jacobs said, which is more than twice that of the machinery maker's traditional apexer.

It is also produced in a smaller footprint with less scrap because of the high-quality extruder, and cuts overall energy consumption per produced apex by roughly 15-20 percent.

"It's redefining apex production, and is a huge improvement for the factory of the future," he said.

Voortman said the final goal is to end up with a more agile production environment for tires.

"I really believe we are at a turning point where, so far, we have more automation, more efficiency and more output efficiency, but the change in your markets really shows that you have to move this around and change it into something different," he said. "And that is something we have to work together on."

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