Aston Martin has improved its production with the introduction of four wall-mounted ABB IRB 5500 robots in the basecoat and clear coat painting booths.
Aston Martin has improved its production with the introduction of four wall-mounted ABB IRB 5500 robots in the basecoat and clear coat painting booths.
The robots paint the complete car body, covering both the chassis and the bumpers attached at front and rear.
“The IRB 5500 is ideal for this application,” commented Robert Low, account manager for ABB’s robotics business. “The robot has the longest reach in its class with excellent path accuracy and is combined with the ABB RB1000 electrostatic bell atomiser to achieve an even distribution of paint over the surface of the car, achieving consistent high finish quality and minimising the amount of paint required.”
ABB’s integrated process system (IPS), a closed loop process system, ensures that both the robot motion and paint process control are precisely co-ordinated to provide optimum quality.
For the basecoat application, the RB1000 is used in its cartridge bell system version providing the necessary isolation of the high voltage that is directly applied to the waterborne paint droplets. The system ensures that each paint cartridge is filled with precisely the required amount of paint, so that waste is always kept to a minimum.
An ABB engineer stayed on site to help Aston Martin with the first three months of the project going live.
