Eisenmann Builds First Skidless Paint Shop for Electric Vehicles

Eisenmann is constructing a turnkey paint shop for electric-vehicle startup DEARCC in Shaoxing, in China’s eastern Zhejiang province.

The carmaker employs highly flexible manufacturing technologies, and ordered a skidless paint shop from plant engineering expert Eisenmann, headquartered in southern Germany. The solution uses VarioLoc conveyors to link individual process steps. The project will be completed in record time; Eisenmann was tasked in the summer of this year, and installation has already begun. The first electric vehicles are expected to roll off the line from late 2019.

Eisenmann’s modular VarioLoc conveyors are the heart of the paint shop for DEARCC. Eliminating the need for heavy skids improves the movement of car bodies. The individual shuttles (dubbed “Locs”) travel along a rail in the floor. Removing skids lays the foundation for far greater flexibility in production in terms of cycle times, throughput, capacity and vehicle architectures.

In the Shaoxing factory, DEARCC will produce a new E-SUV model named ME7. The car is the first model under the high-end brand Enovate, which was released by DEARCC this November. Enovate ME7 uses a wide-body design while shrinking the window section as much as possible to form an aerodynamic Gulfstream shoulder, lowering the drag coefficient and making the vehicle visually very dynamic.

Moreover, a range of other Eisenmann technologies are to be deployed at DEARCC. The Shaoxing facility will feature a pretreatment and electrocoating zone equipped with compact, cost-saving E-Shuttle 200 conveyors. Additionally, Eisenmann will supply spray booths and dryers complete with energy-efficient E-Cubes for paint overspray removal, plus work decks and the ventilation and exhaust air purification systems.

The brains of the paint shop is the E-MES production control system from Eisenmann Industrial Software Company (Enisco). It supports intelligent management in the shape of online planning, material flows control and integrated digital worker guidance – enabling diverse car body types, materials and customer-specific surfaces to be painted within a single facility.

“That is Industry 4.0 in action: connected manufacturing, where our flexible hardware and intelligent software solutions are seamlessly linked,” says Bruno Casorati, senior vice president, automotive systems at Eisenmann. “We’ve integrated end-to-end approach for a highly flexible and efficient, smart paint shop have proved very popular with our customers.”

DEARCC is the second carmaker, after Mercedes-Benz in Kecskemét, Hungary, to take delivery of Eisenmann’s rapidly implemented, one-stop, smart and skidless solution for the paint shop of the future.

Eisenmann SE is a provider of systems and services for surface finishing, material flow automation, thermal process technology and environmental engineering. The family-run enterprise is headquartered in Böblingen, southern Germany, and has been advising and assisting customers across the globe for more than 65 years. It designs and builds flexible, energy- and resource-efficient systems that are tailored to customer-specific requirements, and support manufacturing and intralogistics. Eisenmann has a workforce of over 3,000 worldwide, with 27 sites in 15 countries in Europe, the Americas and the BRIC nations.