Dürr Completes Highly Automated Paint Shop for Ford

The Ford assembly plant in Hermosillo currently produces two vehicles that are exceedingly important to the fortunes of the company in the U.S. market — the Bronco Sport utility and the Maverick hybrid compact pickup — and according to Automotive News it will be adding a third: a small van that uses the company’s C2 front-wheel-drive/all-wheel-drive architecture and would be a replacement for the Transit Connect.

Whether that van is indeed going to be the project or not, something is coming because Dürr has announced the competition of a replacement paint shop for Ford at the Hermosillo complex that has the capacity of handling something of that configuration.

What we do know is this:

• The phosphate and electro dip-coating tanks are equipped with the Dürr Ecopaint PT/EC pendulum system and the EcoDC MACS modular anode control
• There are two painting booths for a three-wet process
• There is a dedicated booth for two-tone painting by masking
• Robots — the Dürr EcoRP E033i model — are used for exterior coating of primer, base and clear cost in booths while the EcoRP S153i, a swingarm robot, is used to paint the ~2.5-meter interior cargo area of the vehicle (which makes a van seem all the more plausible)
• Robots are used on the sealing line: there are four EcoRS 30 L16 sealing robots and two EcoRS 16 overhead handling robots used in the liquid-applied sound deadener zone; two Eco RS16 robots are used for underbody sealing
• The two main three-wet topcoat and the one two-tone booths use Durr EcoEnvirojet wet scrubber technology
• Overall shop and equipment monitoring are performed with DXQplant. Monitoring and DXQequipment.analytics from Dürr that provide fault identification within milliseconds

One of the interesting aspects of the paint shop execution at Hermosillo: the Ecopaint ovens — for e-coat, sealing, two-tone and topcoat — are not only equipped with Oxi.X TR, Dürr’s recuperative thermal oxidizer that eliminates volatile organic compounds (VOCs), but they are located outside of the paint shop.

Vehicle bodies exit the plant, go out to the ovens, then return to the main building.

According to Dürr the objective is to take advantage of the high temperatures and low humidity that are characteristic of Hermosillo. This is an approach that was used for the previous paint shop, as well.

However, Dürr notes (1) “the paint shop is positively pressurized to the outside air” and (2) “the bodies are completely enclosed and not subject to the outside air.” So countermeasures exist to keep from having outside particulates causing surface contamination.