Dürr Painting Robot Equips Audi EV Topcoat Line

Dürr produced its 18,000^th painting robot for car manufacturer Audi in Ingolstadt, Germany. The robot, equipping a new topcoat line for Audi, features the company’s EcoBell4 atomizer with 4-main needle technology for rapid color changes with minimal paint and rinsing agent losses.

Audi’s topcoat line is for painting the interior and exterior of the Audi Q6 e-tron series. The milestone robot, an EcoRP L033i, was installed this past May in the interior paint booth. The six-axis painting robot requires only four seconds for each color change, aided by the company’s 4-main-needle technology.

“This application technology enables us to connect our three most frequently used colors directly to the atomizer, significantly reducing paint and rinsing agent consumption,” explains Sven Veit, director manufacturing engineering paint shop at Audi AG. With the EcoBell4 atomizer, the car manufacturer not only saves operating costs but also protects the environment with fewer VOC emissions.

The new topcoat line includes a total of 28 robots and corresponding application technology. Dürr is also supplying a quality measurement cell to measure paint layer thickness, structure and shade, as well as a cleaning station where two EcoRS Clean F robots use feather rollers to clean the car bodies. For this project, Audi is also using Dürr’s EcoSupply P color supply system with pigging technology to provide unlimited colors consecutively for application.

In 1998, Dürr supplied its first painting robot, an RP7 robot, to Nissan in Spain. The mechanical and plant engineering company is now on its third robot generation, introduced in 2016, benefiting from a modular structure that places the color changer and metering pump on the robot’s front arm.