Duration:

July 2005 – July 2007

 

 

Description:

Most of the industrial production activities in Egypt are based on materials forming, shaping, joining and trimming and all of these activities cannot be done at high production rate without using "Dies" and "Molds" (In definition: Dies and molds are specially designed, machined, heat treated and surface treated metal products that are used to form other raw materials into final value-added products.)  On the other hand, designing and manufacturing of dies and molds is one of the most important problem facing the Egyptian industries and should be considered as the bottle neck to improve the Egyptian products to compete in the foreign market.

 

Currently, most of the Egyptian factories import dies and molds from outside Egypt, from countries such as Turkey, China, India and others, bringing about the Egyptian economy to lose large amount of foreign currency needed for Egyptian development. Moreover, factory owners prefer not to invest much money for importing new dies every short time. Thus, the factories use the same die to produce numerous numbers of the same products for many years. For not well designed and manufactured dies, this leads to the deterioration of the quality and properties of the final products. This also leads to fix the product shape and quality with no change for many years therefore reducing their value and market price. Besides, the dies and molds imported from outside Egypt are subjected to be old fashion technology and maybe produce defective products because the dies and mold producers sell only old fashion products to the developing countries with low prices and keep the state of the art technology for their developed countries or other countries that can pay very high prices.

 

It is an urgent and essential requirement to gather the technical and practical research knowledge and know-how’s and the very state of the art technologies such as computer aided design and manufacturing (CAD/CAM) and rapid prototyping and manufacturing (RPM)  -  in addition to other technologies required for the die and mold production such as materials selection and evaluation, heat treatment, quality control, destructive and non-destructive testing, etc. - that are available at the central metallurgical research and development institute (CMRDI) with the production capacities and experiences of the Egyptian factories in order to improve and modernize the Egyptian industries.

 

This project aims at supporting the practical scientific research efforts for the developing and upgrading of the innovation and production capabilities for the industrial sector in Egypt to produce of high quality and efficient dies and molds in Egypt that are similar and better than the imported ones.

 

The projects aims at (1) making a deep studies to identify the problems facing the process of die design and manufacturing in Egypt, (2) build an atom for a center of Excellency specialized for the die and mold design and manufacturing in Egypt and create an industrial “cluster” that links the Egyptian factories together and support to improve products and production standard and solve production problems, (3) produce two high quality and high efficiency dies. These dies should be advised by factory experts and according to the studies done in (1) and according to the market and financial considerations. And develop and support the capabilities required to build glass molds and (4) develop the human resources in Egypt and create new skillful generation of young engineers who can design and manufacture advanced dies and molds.

 

The following advantages to the Egyptian society and economy should be achieved at the end of the project:

 

1-  Save the foreign currency consumed to design and manufacture dies and molds outside Egypt.

2-  Improve the current production systems and open the door for product innovation and the introduction of new products into the Egyptian and international markets.

3-   Allow the production of high quality value-added products that can be exported to the intentional market and revenue foreign currency to the Egyptian economy.

4-   Allow the factories to change the dies and molds every short time to produce state of the art products and maintain the quality of products.

5-  Assure the high quality of products and inherent their properties from a new and well designed and manufactured dies and molds.

6-  Develop the human resources in Egypt and create new skillful generation of young engineers who can design and manufacture advanced dies and molds.