This article analyses strategies that are improving manufacturing in the aluminum and automotive industries. There are also high-performance plastics that can be injection molded in a single piece to replace assemblies of several metal parts. Automated controls enhance the precision of what were once manual operations and make them safer. Replacing assembled metal parts with injection-molded plastic components often reduces the number of manufacturing steps and their related costs, as well as the weight of the finished product. Advances in instrumentation and control technologies are enabling manufacturers to automate more and more operations, with increases in efficiency and productivity beyond human limits. Ormet Aluminum Mill Products Corp. in Wheeling, WV, recently upgraded the strip casting furnace operations at its coated aluminum and foil aluminum facility in Jackson, MI, this way.

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