CCTV three consecutive reports! How to activate new manufacturing momentum in Sany "lighthouse factory"

On October 26, CCTV's "Economic News Network" published three reports in a row, focusing on Sany Renewable Energy Shaoshan Blade Factory and Sany Heavy Industry No. 18 Plant, which vividly interpret the upgrading road of Made in China with the ultimate intelligence and digital practice.

The following is an excerpt from the report

Travel through the perspective of the machine

See the world's first "lighthouse factory" in the wind power industry

CCTV reporter Yang Ziwei: We are now in this blade factory in Shaoshan, Hunan, and these big guys in my hands are wind turbine blades. The lighthouse plant can produce blades up to about 118 meters long. On average, a 100-meter-level blade like this has shortened its production time from more than 40 hours to about 30 hours now.

As the largest single wind turbine blade production workshop in Asia, it can accommodate 12 sets of molds for simultaneous production, and can produce about 3,000 onshore wind turbine blades with a length of 80 meters per year.

Peng Haibing, deputy general manager of Sany Renewable Energy Shaoshan Blade Factory: (The factory) is in full production throughout the year, taking October as an example, 8 sets of molds were molded in October 174 (100-meter-level blades), 57 sets were put into storage, and more than 100 sets were shipped. The annual production capacity will be released this month, and the next two months will also be a very large delivery cycle.

Under the current trend of large-scale wind turbines, the length of the blades quickly exceeds 100 meters, in addition to the production speed, it must also have high strength, light weight and small production deviation. The harshness of the material process also puts forward higher requirements for the transformation of this blade factory from manufacturing to intelligent manufacturing.

CCTV reporter Yang Ziwei: Now I only need to monitor the production and operation data of the factory in real time through the tablet in my hand. For example, technical indicators such as temperature and humidity of the production unit to blade polishing flatness coefficient can be presented in real time on this platform, so as to achieve 360-degree online monitoring and refined management.

Xie Mengru, engineer of Sany Renewable Energy Intelligent Research Institute: The digital cloud platform can be understood as a "smart brain" of the factory, which is equivalent to us building a virtual factory on the computer that is exactly the same as the actual workshop, helping us reduce defects by about 20% and shorten the delivery time by about 34%.

This lighthouse factory in the world's first wind power industry not only illuminates the workshop production line, but also drives the coordinated upgrading of the entire industry chain. Through the supply chain collaboration platform, the company transmits production demand to suppliers in real time to achieve precise supply and inventory optimization.

Post-80s craftsmen and post-00s junior workers:

A "digital shift" in the workshop

Lu Zhonglin, a veteran wind power man who has been deeply involved in the industry for 17 years, told us that in the past, some processes of blade production from laying, infusion, diaphragm to post-treatment required a lot of manual cooperation to complete, which also led to the fact that sometimes the consistency of product quality was difficult to guarantee.

Lu Zhonglin, deputy director of the Process Technology Institute of Sany Renewable Energy Shaoshan Blade Factory Technology: Since the establishment of the factory in 2022, we have been aware of this problem in the industry and introduced a series of automated and intelligent equipment to empower blade manufacturing.

A new generation of employees is also actively integrating into this intelligent production environment. As a worker in the post-processing workshop, his main job is to let the robotic arm accurately polish the wind turbine blades under the guidance of the laser by inputting parameters.

In this lighthouse factory, new employees like Zhou Yaoting no longer rely on physical strength and repetitive labor, but work by collaborating with robotic arms, laser guidance systems and digital platforms.

Zhou Yaoting, junior worker of Sany Renewable Energy Shaoshan Blade Factory: At the beginning, it took 8 people 3 or 4 hours to manually polish this blade. But now one person operates a machine, and it only takes two or three hours for a blade to be knocked down, which saves a lot of efficiency and time.

In addition, the factory has also independently developed a set of quality digital system, which carves a complete digital context for each leaf and establishes a new manufacturing paradigm that can be traced and optimized.

Lu Zhonglin, deputy director of the Process Technology Institute of Sany Renewable Energy Shaoshan Blade Factory Craft Institute: In the past, from blade production to delivery, a blade would have about hundreds of pages of paper records.

Zhou Yaoting, junior worker of Sany Renewable Energy Shaoshan Blade Factory: Human-machine collaboration, I also rely on it, it also depends on me, there will definitely be more new technologies in our factory in the future, I am still willing to learn those new things and accept new changes.

Standing in the production workshop of Sany Renewable Energy's blade factory, I saw that the centralized infusion system allows the resin to be accurately injected into the mold like an infusion, and the robot automatically polishes the blades to make the flatness higher, saving about 75% of labor costs. Here, the wisdom of the craftsman has never disappeared, but has been precipitated on a digital platform as a replicable and optimisable algorithm.

The "lighthouse factory" drives the overall technological upgrading of the industrial chain

Stimulate regional economic vitality

At present, Hunan has cultivated three world-renowned lighthouse factories, which have driven the overall technological upgrading and cluster development of the industrial chain, and further stimulated the vitality of the regional economy.

Sany Heavy Industry's Changsha No. 18 factory is the first lighthouse factory in the construction machinery industry to reach production, increasing production capacity by 1.5 times and increasing per capita output value by 151% through flexible automated production, artificial intelligence and large-scale industrial Internet.

Sany Renewable Energy Shaoshan Blade Factory has the largest single wind turbine blade in Asia, with a production workshop that can accommodate 12 sets of molds and produce at the same time, covering the whole life cycle of blades through independent research and development of digital original platform. The use of robots for prototype operations has increased production efficiency by 33%.

As a technical benchmark, these lighthouse factories not only accelerate the digital transformation of manufacturing enterprises, drive the overall technological upgrading of the upstream and downstream of the industrial chain, and further stimulate the vitality of the national economy, providing a strong impetus for the high-quality development of the manufacturing industry.