To accommodate a new vehicle that Ford will be producing Dürr has built a high-tech paint shop for the company’s Hermosillo plant in Mexico.
Dürr has built a new paint shop for Ford Motor Company’s plant in Hermosillo, Mexico, which includes low and high viscosity material supply systems, robotic paint and sealer application equipment, and other process automation technology. The new replacement paint shop is located next to the existing stamping and assembly plant, and will accommodate the production of a new Ford vehicle.
This project represents the largest order that Ford has given to Dürr in Mexico.
“We are proud that Ford has given us the opportunity to realize highly efficient concepts, and cutting-edge technologies from Dürr,” states Sandro Picchio, CEO of Dürr Mexico. “We support Ford´s production process with the highest quality standards, the most cost-effective units, and lowest environmental impact.”
The new paint shop
In addition to two painting booths for a three-wet process, Ford’s new plan uses a dedicated booth for two-tone painting by masking. Arranging the two-tone coating separately creates flexibility and ensures highest efficiency of the conventional coating line.
The automatic exterior coating of primer, base, and clear coat in all painting booths is carried out by Dürr’s EcoRP E033i painting robots. The approximately 2.5-meter-long interior cargo areas are base-coated with Dürr’s EcoRP S153i swingarm robots, which are specially designed for painting commercial vehicles: with its highly mobile swingarm, the robot can easily reach surfaces several meters away as well as hard-to-reach areas in the interior. The modularity of this newest generation of robots allows for high flexibility and improved robustness.
As for the two main 3-wet topcoat painting booths and the one two-tone booth, Ford has opted for the EcoEnvirojet wet scrubber technology with its easy cleaning access and maintenance.
The Ecopaint ovens
The plant takes advantage of Hermosillo’s high temperatures and dry weather during most of the year. Installed outdoors, the e-coat, sealing, two-tone, and topcoat Dürr Ecopaint ovens utilize the high ambient air temperature for a more energy efficient heating. The ovens are equipped with Dürr’s recuperative thermal oxidizer Oxi.X TR, which is an elimination system for volatile Organic compounds (VOC) and is the most efficient, cost-effective method of air purification. Designed as a U-turn layout, the modular ovens are located outside so the car bodies can leave the building, go through the ovens, and then return indoors.
The digital solutions
Dürr's scope of supply also included the digital solutions DXQplant.monitoring and DXQequipment.analytics, providing greater visibility of factory and equipment data, while achieving significant downtime reduction. The analysis software, DXQequipment.analytics for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), evaluates all robot and process data, making it easy to trace data, and identify and rectify faults. The technological highlight is a streaming analytics application for real-time data analysis.
Before color comes into play
Dürr installed the phosphate and electro dipcoating tanks equipped with Ecopaint PT/EC pendulum system as well as the modular anode control EcoDC MACS. The modular design of this anode control protects the system from failures. Due to multiple rectifiers, the system allows for an individual setting of voltage, or current profiles, for each car body type; thus, providing for a maximum impact to the coating process.
The sealing line includes manual and automated zones. Four EcoRS 30 L16 sealing robots, and two EcoRS 16 overhead handling robots are installed in the liquid-applied sound deadener (LASD) zone, while the underbody sealing (UBS) zone is equipped with two EcoRS 16. The robots ensure a safe, reliable performance achieved through strategically located sensors that help to avoid errors and collisions.