Dürr Deploys Digitized Paint Shop for SAIC Volkswagen

Quality results are recorded digitally via tablets. The results are correlated with a broad base of data to identify patterns.
Photo Credit: Dürr

Despite restrictions caused by the coronavirus pandemic, Dürr has handed over one of the biggest paint shops in China to SAIC Volkswagen on schedule. The new SAIC Volkswagen joint venture (SVW) plant in Anting near Shanghai, where various electric models and conventionally powered vehicles are produced, boasts a production capacity that is twice that of a standard paint shop at 120 bodies per hour.

A smart painting line records around 3,500 digital data points for every individual body alone. On top of this, sensors supply many gigabytes of data in process values for temperature, pressure, and humidity.

Dürr supplied all of the plant engineering and its proprietary DXQ software products for the highly digitized factory. The digital solutions were developed in parallel with planning and implementing the comprehensive plant engineering — from the RoDip dip coating system through paint booths with EcoDryScrubber dry separation to the oven and the air pollution control. SVW’s digital requirements catalog essentially lined up with the development plan of Dürr’s Digital Factory with the result that many new DXQ products found their way into the plant. 

DXQcontrol software enables the life cycle of each body to be tracked from beginning to end. This starts with the receipt of a production order, whereby the order information is translated into concrete production steps.

A further innovation is the use of mobile apps provided by various DXQ products. For example, employees can manage and filter alarm functions directly at the plant’s point of origin using tablets if the line comes to a stop. Employees can access maintenance data using tablets by scanning QR codes on plant components. In this way, information can be called up directly at the point of origin.

DXQequipment.maintenance software has interfaces to the plant equipment’s almost 130 controllers, and uses them to determine each piece of equipment’s need for maintenance based on up-to-date information like operating hours or counter readings. 

Several terabytes of digital data per year are collected, saved, and evaluated by the intelligent algorithms of the DXQplant.analytics application in the new paint shop. If, for example, an employee detects an irregularity on the paint surface during the quality inspection, he enters it into the tablet. Recorded quality results are correlated with order data (production number, derivative, color, etc.) and process data based on artificial intelligence to identify patterns. A broad base of data makes it possible to track the fault causes in a targeted way and define measures.