Grant: Engage Grants Program

There is a need to improve the production process fence and similar products in order to satisfy customer'srequirements. At present, a variety of techniques are used to produce residential fences and similar industrialproducts that can be used for example in the highway, agriculture and sports industries. Eastern Reinforcingfaced some difficulties in the process of welding which should be optimized to meet the customers' needs. Themain problem is that Eastern Reinforcing is presently using an old but very expensive welding machine whichremains one of the most efficient machines although the technology used to run the unit has not been improvedsignificantly ever since. First, the company would like to maintain its present pool of costumers and expand itby improving the quality of its products. Second, it wishes to improve cost-effectiveness by minimizingmaintenance cost. Third, it wishes to save time and improve productivity by optimizing the calibration processwhen switching from one product to the other. The company approached the Université de Moncton for itsinnovation capacity and its desire to provide research-based solutions to the problem of dummy load control.Purchasing a new welding unit with state-of-the-art technology is very risky for the company since the marketis very volatile. The main objective is to accelerate the production by designing an alternative hydraulic systemin the present welding machine witch will be evaluated by a hydraulic platform dedicated to research.