Dürr has built paint shops for its customer Shanghai General Motors (SGM) at locations in Shanghai and Yantai, as well as one paint shop in Shenyang. The company said it is building another plant at the Shenyang location as the general contractor for SGM-Norsom, the Chinese joint venture between SAIC and General Motors.

In Shenyang, General Motors uses Dürr’s new “non compressed three wet paint process”, which does away with complete drying for the first paint layer, and instead works with an oven for underbody coating and seam sealing. A pendulum conveyor transports the car bodies through both the pretreatment and the electro-dipping.

The EcoDryScrubber, the energy-saving paint booth system from Dürr for the separation of overspray, is used in the spray booths on both topcoat lines. This dry separation requires neither fresh water nor coagulation chemicals. Therefore the booth air does not need to be constantly exchanged. The 95 percent air recirculation results in an energy savings of 60 percent in the paint booth. This technology is already installed or will be installed in more than 45 painting lines on four continents.

Interior and exterior painting in the topcoat area is performed fully automatically with 86 robots from Dürr. The fully automated application is an additional prerequisite for maximum air circulation, which has a positive effect on the energy balance of the painting process. Another factor for a sustainable painting process is the use of the high performance atomizer EcoBell2 HD for interior painting. This atomizer, with its high-speed rotational atomizing and no high voltage charging of the paint, provides significant material savings with its higher transfer efficiency and lower complexity.

The combination of dry separation and fully automatic paint application on the interior and exterior, as well as the use of the high performance rotary atomizer EcoBell2 HD in interior painting, leads to a significant reduction in operating costs. This affects energy consumption as well as the consumption of paint, both of which are drastically reduced. As a result, the higher investment costs will have been amortized in less than two years of operation.

Starting in January 2014 a new car model will be produced in this plant with a capacity of 60 vehicles per hour.