Abstract
The appearance of the painted surface of the vehicle is key in the quality that the automotive customer perceives. The assurance of this quality starts in the automotive paint shop and compromises the effectiveness of the painting process as every paint defect is reworked. This entails material and labour costs, reducing the efficiency of the process and affecting the competitiveness of the product. To improve the efficiency while guaranteeing the quality, predictive control rather than corrective must be implemented. In order to achieve this control, a predictive model of quality is needed. As a first step to generate said model, this article demonstrates the correlation between the variables of the enamel coating process and the quality of the paint film of the vehicle. As there are no available application examples in the industry, a procedure is proposed in which the necessary steps for the creation of an industrial data set and a predictive model of quality are defined. The procedure is tested in an automotive paint shop. As a result, relevant variables for the quality assurance are identified and the correlation between process variables and the resulting quality is verified, concluding that the implementation of predictive control in the process is feasible.
Highlights
The automotive manufacturing process is divided into three main tasks
Regarding the level of the definition, the result is the improvement of the knowledge about the process, including: an in-depth analysis of the process that provides, for each important step, the input, disturbances and expected results related to paint quality Key Performance Indicators (KPI)
Procedures have been developed so that all data, whatever their origin, will be available in the near future. These generation procedures have been based on a study of the state of the art in the generation of data from the painting process within the vehicle manufacturing group
Summary
In the body shop, the metallic structure of the vehicle is created. In the paint shop, a corrosion prevention layer, a coloured layer and a bright protective layer are applied to the metallic surface. The processes carried out in the paint shop, are the most delicate steps in the vehicle manufacturing. A paint shop is a manufacturing bottleneck in many plants due to the complexity of the car body painting process, tight production management labours and rigorous quality requirements. The paint film is composed of a superposition of layers that are applied to the metallic surface throughout the painting process. As presented in [1], historically, these activities have been: washing the metal surface to remove dirt and metal remains from the body shop, phosphating as metal surface pretreatment, cathodic
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