June 28, 2018
A Chinese automotive startup commissions engineering specialist Dürr Group to build a complete paint shop for its new electric-vehicle plant in Nanjing.
The Chinese OEM Future Mobility Corp. will produce EVs under the Byton brand from October 2019. The new paint shop is designed to initially handle 150,000 vehicles per year, equivalent to 30 units per hour. Capacity can be doubled when demand requires, Dürr says in a news release.
To ensure uniformity of heating steel, aluminum and composite materials, Dürr developed a new concept in vehicle drying called EcoInCure, in which car bodies are heated from the inside out by two jet nozzles through the windshield opening and two nozzles directed into the engine-compartment opening.
This technology avoids thermal stresses and significantly improves topcoat quality compared with conventional ovens because heating from the inside out reduces the risk of pinholing.
In addition, minimized flow velocities along the freshly painted surfaces ensure an undisrupted topcoat appearance, Dürr says.
The new paint shop for FMC’s Byton also includes Dürr’s RoDip rotational-dip process for pretreatment and electrocoating – already equipped for 60 units per hour – as well as all the robotic and application technology for the sealing and painting processes.
The electrocoating stage uses energy-saving EcoDC MACS, which uses its modular anode control to create a voltage profile in the tank that moves with the body. The robots in the spray booths are equipped with the latest EcoBell 3 atomizer generation.
The semi-automatic EcoDryX dry separation system, which separates the overspray in the paint booths for primer and topcoat, uses cardboard filters and requires no water or chemicals.
The various technologies combined will reduce the paint shop’s physical footprint 20%, largely due to the EcoInCure process which transports bodies transversely, halving the oven’s required length compared to conventional systems, Dürr says.
FMC’s order includes material feeding for polyvinyl chloride and paint, shop ventilation, fire protection for the process systems, a reverse-osmosis plant to reduce water hardness and purification of exhaust air from the ovens via Dürr’s Ecopure TAR recuperative thermal process, which also provides all the heat for the oven in an energy-efficient way, the Germany-based company says.
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