Text | Number Seven - Song
Traditionally, a highly intelligent factory is a job where robots replace people. This is like a stir-fry robot replacing people, the advantage is that the seasoning and heat control are more accurate.
What do consumers think, you ask? The reality is that the stir-fry robot does rarely miss, but the things made are not necessarily more delicious. The same seems to be true of highly intelligent factories, in addition to improving production speed and avoiding problems such as poor quality consistency caused by human error or error, in fact, there are not many direct and obvious experience upgrades.
It's an embarrassing phenomenon – corporate propaganda is loud, but it's out of touch with the consumer experience.
Nowadays, electric vehicles have set off a fierce car-making revolution, and car companies must seriously think about how to improve the differentiation of high-intelligence factories if they want to make brands stand out. Is there anything different about your car-making technology that allows consumers to get it?
The other day, we entered the ARCFOX Extreme Fox Extreme Wisdom Factory, with this question, I carefully studied the secret book of this smart factory.
Beiqi Blue Valley Magna Automobile Co., Ltd. is located in Dantu District, Zhenjiang City, Jiangsu Province, automotive ecological industrial park, is a high-end new energy vehicle manufacturing joint venture jointly built by BAIC Group and Magna. It is the production base of arcfox series models
At the heart of the advanced nature of smart factories is automation
It is also a new process
If you just improve the traditional process by people to be done by machines, this difficulty is the entry-level version. Higher-level automation is the use of mechanical equipment to bring it into production after overcoming the technical difficulties of the new process.
This is especially important for electric vehicles. Because an electric vehicle that breaks the structure of a fuel vehicle is an innovation from the body structure to the energy and drive system, it is inevitable to use more new processes. For example, the aluminum body structure under the upper steel adopted by Alpha S is very in line with the dual development requirements of taking into account the weight of the body and collision safety.
The lightweight factor of the Alpha S body in white is 1.6, and the more than 100 white bodies selected by the European ECB are 2.8. In addition, its torsional stiffness is as high as 41.8 kNm/°, and the same level is generally in the range of 20~30 kNm/°
However, the journey of the birth of the car was not calm. It starts from a piece of metal plate after a thousand tons of pressure, and then is grabbed by the robot to flash around, the electric light and flint are spliced into a white body; the body is then drilled into the electrophoresis tank for washing, followed by a sauna and spray paint; and finally the assembly of various parts is completed in the final assembly workshop, which has become what we see.
In view of the body setting of the aluminum under the upper steel, the stamping workshop of the Jihu Jizhi factory has a highly automated steel and aluminum mixing production line, which can simultaneously meet the stamping production of different materials such as non-galvanized steel plate, galvanized steel plate, laser welded plate, aluminum plate and so on.
I have noticed that the stamping A line that has been completed is a fully enclosed, high-speed automated production line that can realize the mixed production of steel and aluminum. The production line consists of a 2400T, 1 1200T, 3 1000T with a total of 5 presses and a fully automated transmission system consisting of a Swiss GUDEL single-arm crossbar manipulator. Presses of this magnitude will ensure that the stamping sheet metal molding effect is excellent, which is very beneficial to the assembly accuracy.
This whole line can also realize automatic plate replacement, automatic mold replacement, stamping waste automatic transmission and other work. Significantly improves work efficiency and ensures high JPH (production cycle time)
When these parts are stamped, how to assemble them is also a new technical problem. Because aluminum-aluminum welding and aluminum-steel welding are more difficult than traditional steel-steel welding. To this end, the Jihu Jizhi factory uses new material connection technology (riveting, etc.) to solve this problem, and achieves high automation work, and the automation rate of all connection points (riveting, welding) has reached 100%.
In order to ensure the stability of the aluminum connection under high beat, the Jihu Jizhi factory also adopts a central control management system to connect the process parameters such as welding, SPR, FDS, gluing to the central control, including automatic parameter backup and monitoring, effectively ensuring the quality of the on-site process.
Coming to the paint workshop, in response to the DNA of electric vehicle energy saving and emission reduction, its paint process has also injected environmental protection genes, and every new car that passes through this production line adopts a water-free B1B2 process. The lower VOC (volatile organic compound) content of the water-based paint process compared to the oil-based paint process, coupled with the blessing of the additive coating process, can further reduce VOC emissions.
The paint process is the most serious part of the car building process. Environmentalists love electric vehicles, and it is not enough to focus only on its clean power
When you come to the assembly workshop, you may think that you can finally breathe a sigh of relief and assemble the various parts and components. But in fact, cars are paying more and more attention to assist driving ability, and assisted driving functions just need a series of devices such as cameras, millimeter wave lightning brake systems, controllers and so on to work together. So it's not enough to assemble them automatically/semi-automatically, you have to make sure they work well when assembled.
In order to cooperate with L2.5 driver assistance, the assembly workshop of the Jihu Jizhi factory adopts an advanced driver assistance ADAS calibration table, replacing the traditional four-wheel station. Its calibration collection HUD head-up display, MRR forward detection millimeter wave radar, MPC forward camera one-stop automatic calibration.
For future L4 advanced driver assistance, this calibration table also features a redundancy concept. It can meet the one-stop calibration of lidar, millimeter wave radar, gyroscope and camera at the same time. (This is the last quality inspection area, no suitable ADAS calibration table photo was found)
Above we have seen the high level of new processes and automation equipment in the four major workshops (stamping, body, paint, and final assembly) of the Jihu Jizhi factory. But strictly speaking, electric vehicles should also have a "battery PACK workshop", which is the "powertrain workshop" corresponding to fuel vehicles.
At the automatic station in the battery PACK workshop of the Polar Fox Jizhi Factory, I saw several interesting details.
1) FDS riveting technology is used on the battery PACK for fixing between the upper cover and the box. In the prior art, a very common way is to fix it by screws. But we know that the car is often encountered in bumps, rain, mud and other bad working environment, screw fixing way is prone to mechanical damage and loosening of the fastening parts, resulting in poor dustproof and waterproof effect.
Riveting is a fastening riveting process, which has the advantages of high tensile and shear strength, extremely small thermal deformation and thermal stress, and is suitable for working with glue connections. These ensure that the battery PACK has good enough stability.
The dustproof and waterproof rating of the battery PACK must reach IP67 or even higher, so its sealing means must be strong enough
2) The thermal conductive adhesive it uses can evenly transfer the heat generated by the battery module to the liquid cold plate through the thermal conductive adhesive, and then take the heat away through the liquid cooling system. Thermal conductivity is 1 times higher than that of ordinary thermal insulation materials. We know that the power battery is very afraid of heat, and good heat dissipation means can ensure battery performance and life.
The core of the benign operation of the smart factory is the machine
It is also a production and operation management system
Usually understood, smart factories should abandon labor and use machines to complete various tasks. But such a rough understanding is not right, because the automobile manufacturing chain is long and complex, it is unrealistic for machines to complete all the work alone, and many machines cannot understand the user's improvement opinions, or need people to program regulation.
This series of problems is integrated into one point, that is, smart factories also rely heavily on efficient production and operation management systems.
The Polar Fox Jizhi plant adopts Magna's MAFACT production operation management system. This world-class standard system has hatched a number of luxury models such as Mercedes-Benz G-Class/M-Class, BMW X3/5 Series, Chrysler 300C, Jaguar, etc., representing the strongest strength of European century-old automobile manufacturing.
The core technology of the manufacturing plant is the system, and the "new joint venture" model between BAIC and Magna shows that they have broken the traditional joint venture model and really shared a series of core documents such as process system, patented technology, product development process, training documents and so on
Just like running a company requires security departments, business departments, human resources, customer service departments, and so on. The MAFACT system is subdivided into 8 segments, which penetrate into all aspects of production: safety, health and environmental protection, quality, manufacturing excellence, material control and logistics, engineering design and pre-quality planning, management, human resources, cost.
And considering that the working characteristics of each link are different, each plate here has a different goal. For example, in the key body riveting, MAFACT requires the body to reach a riveting pass rate of 99% or even higher. It is precisely because of the strict and efficient control of all links that this set of operation management system will be recognized by many luxury brands.
summary
The Polar Fox Jizhi Plant is Magna's first vehicle manufacturing plant outside of Europe, and expectations are high. After the field experience, I think that this factory meets the new needs of electric vehicle development, and has a high level of output in automated production, intelligent manufacturing technology, new material connection technology, flexible production, quality control, green environmental protection and other aspects.
And what is surprising is that this "new joint venture" model between BAIC and Magna also realizes the sharing and use of international leading technologies such as platform intellectual property rights and R&D system processes. This shows that they are more transparent and closely linked than the traditional model. The competitiveness of ARCFOX extreme fox products is more guaranteed.