Fully automated sealing plant
After the EC, the individual spot-welded seams of the primed car body are sealed in a Dürr sealing plant. An underbody sealant that protects the vehicle from stone-chipping and corrosion is applied here simultaneously. This process is fully automated with eight EcoRS Dürr standard robots and can be reprogrammed flexibly for other car body types, if necessary.
F
ollowing this, the cleaning system Ecopaint Clean removes loose dirt particles from the car bodies. Rotating feathers swipe over the car body’s outer skin, gathering and removing the dust lying on it.
For the 3-wet-paint process specific to Ford, the car bodies branch into two lines. A total of 32 paint robots of the type EcoRP L033 apply the primer paint, as well as the base coat and clear coat, in three directly consecutive steps. All robots are equipped for this task with the proven high speed rotating atomizer EcoBell2. The innovative air conditioning EcoSmart AC ensures optimum air management and thus contributes additionally to the high paint finish quality at Ford in Sanand. Even with the climatic challenges typical for India, such as high temperatures and humidity, the air conditioning performs precisely and is stable long-term. This reduces energy consumption significantly by up to 30% and simultaneously lowers the production costs. The investment in EcoSmart AC pays off within a year. “This is how, a new benchmark has been set in the Indian market by the interaction of the innovative plant technologies by Dürr and the internal Ford paint process,” says Manfred Weil, Head of the Dürr Division Paint and Final Assembly Systems, describing the cooperation with Ford.
Robots work in degrade mode
Should a robot fail, the required cycle time can be still adhered to via the so-called degrade mode. In this case, the other machines take over the painting scopes of the failed robot and thus continue operating at the same cycle speed. This not only prevents downtime, but reduces the cost per unit sustainably.
The final drying booth and the oven after the EC are also equipped with the Dürr air purification plant EcopureTAR, which dedusts the process exhaust air by combustion. By means of downstream heat recovery systems, residual heat is returned from the cleaned exhaust air to the manufacturing process. This is how the use of resources and CO2 emissions can be reduced even more.
EcoEMOS – Intelligent IT for production
The supervisory control system EcoEMOS from Dürr ensures the control and visual display of the entire production. Based on many years of experience in plant engineering, this software links the production’s control level with the plant’s job management and creates efficiency through transparency. Thanks to the simple access to process data, the production costs can again be reduced effectively and the production quality increased.
Once 240,000 passenger cars have rolled off the assembly line at the new Ford factory in Sanand after a year has passed, the vehicles will have undergone a consistently resource-saving paint process of pretreatment, seam sealing, application technology and automation, right up to air pollution control. “By means of this efficient process, we have succeeded in lowering the consumption of materials and energy significantly, which further cascades to a lower Carbon footprint as compared to conventional painting processes,” summarizes Girish Kumar, Paint Area Manager of Ford Sanand.
