THE CHALLENGE

Over the past few years, the range and requirements of the paining industry - especially in automobile production batch painting - has become increasingly more demanding.

The need for painting on 3-dimensional forms (shapes – or also “frogs”) is becoming increasingly greater. Small batch installations are becoming increasingly relevant - something not only attributable to that indispensable quality control in the paint producing industry for assessing paint sequences and glance-conditioned paint effects.

Generally manual painting has been resorted to for paining these forms up to now.
Medium-sized companies, in particular, have frequently shied away from the increased outlay on investment costs, space required and service personnel of a robot system.

Experience to date has revealed the limited nature of the existing robot painting concepts involving the robot-directed atomizer painting the quasi-stationary workpiece. This process although appropriate for large workpieces can only be described as inefficient for small and lightweight workpieces representing, in particular, shapes or frogs.

Due to their weight of over 5 kg, the electrostatic HR atomizers required for the OEM application, in particular, need to be moved by correspondingly large robots. Moreover, in view of the susceptibility to high accelerations of the air-mounted turbines, as a rule, greater painting speeds require large movement areas to reduce the acceleration forces. For coating shapes, this results in the need to operate relatively large (expensive) robots in front of comparatively large extractor walls (with a correspondingly high/expensive supply/exhaust air flow rate).

This is where Oerter comes in to innovatively and optimally exploit potentials.