Supply air systems are essential in automotive paint booths, ensuring the correct temperature and humidity for high-quality surface coating. What’s more, these systems create comfortable working conditions and the optimal climate for storing paints. However, air conditioning is highly energy-intensive because incoming outside air flowing must be continuously treated. “Until now, air conditioning has accounted for around one-third of a paint shop’s total energy consumption. To reduce this, Dürr has enhanced DXQequipment.analytics with an intelligent control system that enables operators to optimize energy and operating costs for the first time,” says Jens Häcker, Vice President Digital Factory at Dürr.
Energy savings through a flexible control window
Smart AC calculates an energy-optimized range for temperature and humidity based on the specific system and the local climate conditions. The minimum and maximum values define the setpoint range, which is displayed to the system operator as a ‘control window.’ The larger the window, the less energy is required to control the heating, cooling, and water input. Traditionally, supply air systems have been set to fixed setpoint values that maintain safe margin from critical limits for the paint application, often leading to unnecessary heating or cooling. “Our digital solution, with its optimized control strategy, enables precise and efficient regulation of supply air systems within a defined range,” explains Jens Häcker. “Instead of conditioning air to a fixed temperature, such as of 23°C, the system can flexibly adjust between 21°C and 25°C. This reduces consumption while maintaining consistently high coating quality”
An intuitive user interface provides operators with real time insights into all relevant data, ensuring end-to-end process transparency. The overview displays current consumption values of the conditioning modules, setpoint values and trends for booth conditions, control options, and a detailed comparison energy consumption between window control compared to the previous point control method. The impact is illustrated with the following example: An air supply system for base coat and clear coat lines with a capacity of 350,000 m3/h operates with 80% recirculated air, and 30% of the days require a rapid adjustments due to weather fluctuations. Regardless of the location, annual energy costs using the flexible window approach were approximately 30,000 euros lower. The warmer and more humid the climate, and the higher the energy cost, the greater the potential savings.
Advanced Analytics Smart AC is a new module of the DXQequipment.analytics software developed by Dürr for acquiring, evaluating, and visualizing robot and process data. To support more sustainable operation of supply air systems, Smart AC can be integrated into both new and existing systems.
