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In order to be able to develop industrial refrigerated and frozen food cabinets for supermarkets according to its customers' specifications and to manufacture them economically in small batches, the Spanish specialist Frost-trol has commissioned a state-of-the-art production facility. "Our current customers are the large chains in the grocery trade, who no longer just buy equipment from us, but tailor-made solutions for their very brand-specific outlets," says Jorge Herreros, operations manager at Frosttrol, describing the effects of a change in strategy at Frost-trol over the past few years. This has also had serious consequences for production: "We used to mass-produce the individual cooling modules and store them until they were sold. Today, we produce exactly the elements needed to process an order. This is highly efficient, but also poses an enormous challenge to the flexibility of our production, which we are meeting with our new plant here in Cabanes," says the plant manager.

For powder coating, the task was to completely restructure both the pretreatment and coating phases and optimally integrate them into the processes of the entire production. "In order to achieve a constant material flow, it was first essential to precisely determine the process times of all machines and work steps. When coordinating them, it was necessary to take into account, among other things, that the workpieces pass through the various plant areas at different speeds. On the basis of this data, we ran through countless conceivable options and alternatives in extensive simulations and in the end calculated the optimum configuration of the plant," says Rubén Cubillas, who is responsible for the coating plant at Frost-trol, briefly summarizing the planning phase.

The result of this intensive preliminary work stands in a newly built production hall in Cabanes, Spain. "For 25 years we produced with one coating line," says Cubillas, "but the flexibility in production required today can only be achieved with highly automated, redundant coating. This was achieved by setting up two parallel coating lines."

Central elements of the coating plant are the two ColorMax3 booths, one of which was commissioned at the end of 2017, while the second was added the following year. In the place of these two booths, there were three conventional booths before the conversion - although the number of booths has been reduced, the performance has increased enormously: "We consistently rely on Nordson's HDLV dense phase technology," explains Jorge Herreros, adding as justification: "The eight Encore HD automatic guns spray with a very soft powder cloud, which hits our workpieces at low speed and distributes itself very evenly on them. This produces an excellent coating quality that hardly ever requires rework, and we benefit from enormously efficient powder application."

Another advantage lies in the fast cleaning. "We are prepared for up to 40 product and color changes a day with this system," reports Herreros. "This is only economically feasible if downtime is minimal!" Powder is transported by the Encore HD pumps, which deliver powder very evenly and accurately - a prerequisite for the maximum process control and reproducibility of coating results that Nordson HDLV (High Density, Low Velocity) dense phase technology excels at. "We typically coat at 60 to 70 µm, creating a particularly homogeneous surface that eliminates the need for rework," Herreros says.

A forward-looking solution for the user

A special feature of the installation at Frost-trol is that two additional PowderPilot HD screens were installed directly on the booths for system control. "This also serves to increase efficiency and optimize processes," explains Rubén Cubillas. "Depending on where the operator is at the moment, the time in which he can read information about the current status of the plant modules or initiate the next steps is reduced." The operator panels themselves are Nordson standard and feature icon-driven and intuitive operability.

What has been created here is a piece of the future, a Smart Factory, as the development towards "Industry 4.0" will increasingly produce: All plant areas are networked with each other, communicate and complement each other to form a fully automated production. It makes it possible to move away from series production and to manufacture the various modules of a cooling system exclusively on a project-oriented basis as required. The basis of the entire production is the high flexibility of the individual modules, especially in the powder coating system. "On average, we carry out about eight color changes per shift. This is a big step forward compared to the old system: whereas it used to take around 25 grueling minutes for a color change, it is now done in 10 to 12 minutes, stress-free and almost fully automatically," says a pleased Mr. Cubillas.

Like the entire plant, the dense phase powder coating system operates in two shifts 16 hours a day, five days a week. For coating surfaces that come into contact with food, an antibacterial powder is used that is somewhat difficult to handle. Nevertheless, the system produces an absolutely uniform surface quality. Refinishing is virtually unnecessary. "Reliably achieving this quality time and time again is very important for us, because the finished refrigerated cabinets later stand in the very bright light of our customers' salesrooms and their demands for a perfect finish are rightly very high." A major advance of the modern coating system can also be seen in the greatly increased capacity values. With the two new coating systems, instead of the previous three booths, double the output is achieved - and this with a simultaneous powder consumption reduction of around 20 percent. Jorge Herreros concludes: "The new coating system with HDLV technology meets our high demands for quality and sustainability, and allows us to run our modern project production with batch size 1 absolutely economically.

Nordson Germany GmbH
www.nordson.com