EDITORIAL
The Factory of the Future is already here.
A
Alessia Venturi Editor-in-chief Direttore Responsabile
few common development topics and trends have been emerging for some time in every industrial segment: use of lightweight materials, resource efficiency, production automation and digitisation as a new industrial paradigm 4.0, carbon footprint reduction, and cost saving. The car industry, however, has grasped and realised these concepts like no other. The combination of different materials in the design of new generation cars entails increasingly challenging technological issues for OEMs and their suppliers of surface treatment plants and products. In the last few years, in order to meet the need for weight and consumption reduction, aluminium has been increasingly employed in the construction of bodies, in higher or lower percentages depending on the car segment. Nonetheless, the common goal of all OEMs is the construction of aluminium-only bodies in the near future. This change in materials makes the already existing pre-treatment and cataphoresis plants obsolete, since the new metal mix requires extreme flexibility and accuracy of treatment so that all surfaces, regardless of their nature, achieve the same characteristics of corrosion resistance, coating adhesion, and uniform look. That is why the new coating lines intended for the automotive sector implement body handling technologies that enable to choose from different treatment sequences, or even skip some process stages, depending on the type of vehicle being produced. This results in high productivity, low consumption and costs, and higher treatment quality. Digitisation and man-machine interaction have reached such levels that it is possible to design paintshops that are fully managed and constantly monitored through wearable devices, such as smartphones or augmented reality glasses; where the application of the Internet of Things enables systems and devices to communicate with the operators and self-learn from them the best “behaviours� to achieve maximum efficiency; where half the resources are consumed; and where flexibility is such that it becomes mass customisation. The industrial revolution of the auto industry also involves chemistry. Pre-treatment products are selective and give high corrosion resistance properties to various types of substrates. Soundproofing materials are water-based and increasingly light to help reduce the weight of cars. Coatings ensure more and more varied, customisable and pleasing aesthetic and tactile effects. New generation clearcoats are able to orientate the metallic basecoat particles to give the special effects a new dimension. You will find all this and much more in the explosive ipcmŽ issue you are about to read, which includes one of the best feature stories on the automotive industry of the last few years: we have crossed the world to find prestigious examples that the new digital production paradigms are already a reality. Finally, in the last part of the magazine, you will find a feature story on the latest and most effective technologies for washing and cleaning mechanical components, because nothing is left to chance in the automotive industry.
international PAINT&COATING magazine - JULY/AUGUST 2017 - N. 46
05