Digital Thread of Intelligent Manufacturing and Quality Management of Titanium Pipes within Digital Twins

Author of the article:CHAI Zaixian 1 , WANG William Yi 1,2 , ZHANG Jia 3 , SUN Feng 4 , YANG Chao 3 , ZHANG Zhiyuan 5 , LIU Xilin 5 , LI Qiang 4 , WANG Jun 1 , KOU Hongchao 1,2 , LI Jinshan 1,2

Author's Workplace：1. State Key Laboratory of Solidification Processing, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an 710072, China; 2. Innovation Center NPU Chongqing, Chongqing 401135, China; 3. Western Superconducting Technologies Co., Ltd., Xi'an 710018, China; 4. Ti-MAST High Performance Alloy Co., Ltd., Chongqing 401135, China ; 5. Luoyang Ship Material Research Institute, Luoyang 471000, China

Key Words：digital twin; titanium pipe; template model design; automatic data collection; microstructure optimization

Abstract： In the digital era, integrated intelligent manufacturing plays a significant role in reflecting the level of national
manufacturing. Motivated by numerous national strategies, including Material Genome Engineering, Integrated
Computational Materials Engineering, digital twins and so on, digital technologies have been developed vigorously to fit the
urgent requirements of lifetime quality management of materials, processes, products, equipment together with their
corresponding components/parts. Digital technologies have been accelerated and developed by the manufacturing industry
through a digital-networked-intelligent transformation routine. In line with the digital thread of the whole processing/supply
chain and the lifetime management in digital twins, this work presents several dominant intelligent manufacturing  technologies for classical casting and extrusion processes to improve the microstructure and property optimizations, quality
management, smart design, and development of advanced titanium pipes. With respect to intelligent manufacturing
technologies of pipe parts, the data collection, visualization of the utilized shell furnace equipment, castability of the casting
samples and high-throughput standard mechanical specimens are utilized. Moreover, based on our designed templates,
standards, and processing strategies in the smart design/development of titanium pipes, simulation technologies, data
collection in manufacturing, an algorithm together with its model optimizing the microstructures in heat treatments is
proposed. It is understood that the aforementioned intelligent technologies will not only enable the rapid and cost-effective
fabrication and validation of the properties/performances of raw materials but also improve the efficiency of the titanium
pipe manufacturing process and quality control, paving a firm path for the further development of intelligent manufacturing
technologies.