Content area
Metal flange ends typically manufactured through sheet/steel cutting process are incorporated at both ends of the pipe to allow for the mounting surface for the valves, pumps, transitions, or other products, thus creating a seal within a piping system. For example, a product can include a pipe and flange solution that connects a residential or commercial water line to another line or pump. When properly designed, assembled, and secured with bolts, joints created by flanges are invaluable for oil and gas transportation. The system offers a wide range of flange designs, including "threaded," "socket-weld," "slip-on," "lap joint," "weld neck," "blind," and also "specialty." This variety ensures the system’s adaptability to various applications. Consideration is also given to the characteristics of the face types, such as Flat Face, Raised Face, and Ring-Type Joint, to mention a few (The Piping Engineering resource, 2024; Texas Flange, 2024). Due to the intricacies of these designs, cutting and machining them to suit the specified valve sizes results in a large amount of waste. When steel plate cutting operations are performed using multiple tools and cutting patterns, a combination of cutting patterns can be employed to shape the flanges to different dimensions to meet various sizes of valves available in the market and to ensure they connect correctly to the pipes. Because of the variety of cutting patterns that one can develop for the different flange sizes, it is necessary to minimize waste by optimizing the cutting process.
The research develops a linear and integer linear programmable model to optimize the cutting operation when producing different flange sizes. The study identifies the cutting patterns one can use and determines the amount of steel waste generated from feasible cutting operations. The rectangular strategy is currently used to lay out the cutting patterns to minimize raw material waste. Waste generated when this approach is used is compared to waste generated when an optimized model is applied. For the given quantity of flanges produced monthly, the optimized model minimizes steel waste, the number of raw materials used, and the time taken to complete the cutting operation, thereby providing direct savings for the industry.