8 CASE STUDY

Process visualization

Cab painting for Volvo trucks

Optimum from the

T
he Volvo Truck Corporation is one of The driver cabs are offered in numerous
the world leaders for heavy trucks. variants – from the comfortable sleeper
The company has production and de- with a miniature office for long distance
velopment sites in Sweden, Belgium, the haulage to the simple day cab. A modular
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USA and Brazil. The trucks for the Euro- system with standardized components is
pean market are built in Gothenburg (Swe- therefore used for the cabins which can be
den) and Gent (Belgium) whereby the en- applied for many models. At present Volvo Robots developed by Dürr take over the
application of the prime paintwork with a
gines, gears and driver cabs are supplied Umeå makes three cab series with a total of 100 % repetitive accuracy
by different factories in Sweden. 11 different models.
The cabs are fully prepared for installa-
Cabin production for the whole
tion in Umeå and then transported to the extension. The most important investment
of Europe
assembly works by rail. The production in- here was a new painting plant for the prime
The Volvo factory in Umeå is Volvo’s only cludes the complete metalworking, cab paintwork of the driver cabs. Dürr Paint
production site for truck cabs in Europe. In body construction, surface treatment, Systems in Stuttgart received the general
this factory in Northern Sweden, 250 miles painting and final assembly. The whole contract for this.
away from the Polar Circle, the cabins for production in Umeå is automated to a great The new painting plant from Dürr con-
all Volvo models are built and then trans- extent with robots. sists of a cleaning system, a hand painting
ported to the assembly works in Gothen- system EcoMacc, two airbrush systems for
Higher capacity due to new
burg and Gent. The Umeå factory also sup- the interior painting with automatic door
painting line …
plies CKD (completely knocked down) as- openers, two ESTA systems for the outside
sembly kits for the cabs to factories in Asia, The annual production was to be increased painting and two dryers. The plant is con-
Africa, Australia and America. from 50,000 to 60,000 cabs with a capacity sidered one of the most modern in the

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 9
Schematic plant config-
Control room level WinCC uration of the new
archiving server painting plant at Volvo,
WinCC Clients Umeå

Router

WinCC Server

OSM OSM

Redundant TCP/IP-Ring (Fiber optic/twisted pair)

OLM

S7-400F
Profibus with Profisafe

Robot Robot
control control
WinCC WinCC
Clients Clients

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Profisafe Profisafe
ET 200S-F The Simatic WinCC system offers a
Robot Robot
comfortable overview of the current
Control level Application level painting process

world and meets the strictest environmen- into the painting control system. Accord- process as well as the process and conveyor
tal regulations regarding solvent emis- ing to the respectively identified cab the technology. The control level is equipped
sions. master Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) with ten Simatic-400Fs with which the whole
system requests the appropriate painting painting plant is controlled. The communi-
… with distributed control technology
data and outputs them to the correspon- cation is distributed on two TCP/IP net-
Dürr suggested the Siemens AG to the Vol- ding painting controller. Volvo uses three works: one network for linking the process
vo Truck Corporation as the supplier for different paints for the prime paintwork data, another for visualization with inte-
the automation and control technology. which depend on the shade of the final coat gration in the factory network.
The Swedish auto manufacturer decided, of paint. At the control level Profibus with Profi-
after detailed evaluation, to accept Dürr’s The painting control system receives safe technology is used in which safety-ori-
suggestion and had its new painting line the current quality data such as type, color, ented functions such as light barrier, emer-
equipped with Simatic WinCC as a control process data and alarms from the control gency stop switch, door position switches
system and failsafe Simatic S7-400F con- level as a reply and passes them on to the together with the standard control func-
trollers and a distributed periphery. The ERP system so that a continuous record is tions are linked decentrally. The communi-
system concept with WinCC as a process vi- available for tracing the individual body cation with the superior ERP system takes
sualization system was designed and im- right into the ERP level. The data are also place based on TCP/IP and Web Services.
plemented in cooperation with the available locally through the archive serv- Volvo is very pleased with the user friend-
Siemens Paint Center and WinCC Compe- er for long-term analyses. liness of the new control system. The ca-
tence Center in Stuttgart. The WinCC server is designed redun- pacity, availability and productivity have
The system concept of the WinCC-SCA- dantly with two servers. This server system increased considerably in comparison with
DA system with client-server structure and is supplemented by an archive server for the old painting plant according to factory
the distributed automation architecture archiving the message data and value information. A second painting plant is be-
with homogeneous programming and da- archives as well as an engineering station ing planned for the final painting at Volvo
ta storage ultimately proved superior to with which both WinCC and all controllers Umeå. ■
the PC-based single station systems previ- and the Micromaster drives are parameter-
ously used in the paint shop sector. ized, loaded and saved. The backup and
version management is user-friendly with
Painting control technology of the
Simatic A&D Data Management ADDM.
highest standard
As operating stations 11 WinCC Clients More information:
The cabs entering the paint shop are regis- are integrated at the moment for the visu- www.siemens.com/wincc
tered via a mobile data system and logged alization and operation of the painting E-mail: micael.amandusson@siemens.com

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