LeBeDigital

Life cycle of concrete - ontology development for the concrete production process chain

Concrete is one of the most important construction materials worldwide and is characterised by an enormous adaptability to changing requirements. This comes with a high, and continuously increasing, complexity in terms of raw materials, formulations and the manufacturing process. In order to fully exploit the technical and environmental potential of concrete construction requires the highest level of expertise among the individual players in the construction industry. Currently, there is an unsatisfactory knowledge transfer both from research into industry and experience from successful special applications into broad practice which has hindered progress. Solving this problem is the goal of the joint project "LeBeDigital". It sets itself the challenging task of developing a generally available data and knowledge management system tailored to the process of concrete production on the basis of generally applicable ontologies and workflows. The project puts particular emphasis on the manufacturing process under the easily controllable conditions in the precast industry. The aim is to link the experimental and simulation-based material data relevant for concrete production across scales in a knowledge-based manner, to validate it and to make it usable for future applications in precast production. In developing this knowledge-based database, the joint project "LeBeDigital" has set itself the goal of making experience and research data permanently usable and accessible to the general public at a high level and with deep information content. This paradigm shift to the design of concrete components, from predefined in extensive codes and leaflets to knowledge-based, performance-oriented material design and takes into consideration the whole product life cycle. The close integration into the current nationwide initiative for the digitalisation of materials’ research will amplify the potential for impact on the domestic construction industry. For example, a suitable database structure can provide groundbreaking impulses for the construction industry, which is strongly fragmented into individual stakeholders. The desired effects for the industry, which go hand in hand with an increase in efficiency in terms of sustainability and costs, are, for example, the evaluation of data employing machine learning methods as a basis for numerical simulations for material optimisation or for the control and automation of the production of precast concrete parts.

The processing of rubber compounds by means of single-screw extrusion has been chosen as an example process from the rubber industry. The process chain starting with the raw materials and ending with the finished rubber component is divided into many sub-steps, similar to the baking trade. Essential are the selection of ingredients, mixing, rolling, shaping, vulcanising ("baking") and finally product control. During these processing steps, a lot of data is collected, for example direct machine settings such as speed, screw and barrel temperature or indirect machine data such as rubber temperature, pressure and output.

Often, however, the quality of the end product is heavily dependent on the experience of long-serving employees from a wide range of disciplines. Especially when using natural rubber, a renewable but often unspecified raw material, there are often variations in processing.

In this research project, the knowledge and experience of the employees are to be used to collect, evaluate and then digitize existing process data and data to be determined experimentally. In order to link all this data from the various disciplines of process technology, logistics, chemistry, physics and mathematics (simulation), the existing language customs of each individual discipline will be transferred into a common standard language. By networking all the machines involved in real time, it will thus be possible to produce closer to optimum quality, to counteract the increasing shortage of skilled workers and to significantly strengthen Germany as a high-tech location for rubber processing.

LeBeDigital - Project runtime: 01.02.2021 - 31.01.2024