Painting auto parts at Liaoyuan, China

With China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, the manufacturing industry, especially automobile, motorcycle and household appliances, increased its demand for industrial robot applications to meet the dynamic growth and fierce competition. Industrial robots and their automatic production equipment play an important role in improving quality and productivity and reducing cost and labor intensity. The focus of the industrialization was shifted to industrial robot-based production equipment and control systems and an industrial robot-based automatic production line.

Liaoyuan is a manufacturer of plastic auto parts and a quality supplier to car manufacturers like DPCA. In 2003, to meet the increasingly fierce competition, Liaoyuan decided to spend over one hundred million Yuan building the first automatic painting line for plastic auto parts in Central China.

This time ABB provided 6 IRB 5400 paint robots, and installation and commissioning for the painting line, which helped Liaoyuan improve productivity and deliver on time. Increasing competition resulted in increasing demands. In 2007, Liaoyuan bought 6 more IRB 5400 paint robots to improve capacity even more.

Liaoyuan enhanced its productivity, reliability and quality using the ABB robots. “Robots are capable of handling complicated profiles. It was difficult to improve the quality and capacity of the parts with manual labor. Now, with these agile robots, our coating film thickness is ensured with better quality and doubled capacity, and our costs for a single part has been reduced by 20%,” said Zhou Yu, Equipment Manager at Liaoyuan.

Facts

About Wuhan Liaoyuan Located in Wuhan Economic and Technological Development Zone, Liaoyuan is a specialist in injection moulding and coating of small to large auto parts. The company combines development, injection moulding, coating and assembly with logistics and focuses on systematic support and modular supply.