Highly integrated and awarded

09 / 2012 - FRIMO has been honored once again with the “Plastics Oscar”. Along with another award within the context of SPE Automotive Awards 2012, FRIMO’s performance in the area of tooling and machinery manufacturers was recognized with a first place award for the P30 project of the BMW 3-Series. Johnson Controls and Wiesmayer were presented First Prize for this project for their use of natural fibre technology, which made it possible to reduce component weight and, in this case, also achieve faster turnaround times and lower CO2 emissions.
FRIMO supplied a fully automated carrier part press line for the project, including trim for the carriers of all four door trim assemblies made of natural fibres with thermoset matrix. The unit comprises two parallel lines, one each for the front door (left and right) and the back door (left and right).
The scope included a mat magazine as a turntable, an alignment station with loading robots, hot presses with hot press moulds and air extraction, and handling robots for laser inscription, along with a cooling station and a conditioning station. FRIMO also supplied the removal and loading robots in the raw component punch press, and the raw component punch press and dies, along with a position-based ejection shuttle to the injection moulding unit as well as the finished part dies and a waste conveyor system. The complete carrier travels through the production unit with an impressive cycle time of 47 seconds. A raw mat is thereby taken from a turntable magazine, aligned by means of a loading robot, and pressed in hot press moulds with an overall tolerance of 0.1 mm.  This also includes pinching Master Location Points (MLPs) and pressing a positioning system into the waste area. Both of these operations help maintain extremely high precision in downstream processes.
Removal of the parts from the hot press mould and their subsequent inscription with a laser were particularly challenging design tasks. A large conditioning line integrated within the production unit conditions the pressed parts, effectively subjecting them to an “artificial ageing process”. This ensures that all parts achieve the same state – and maintain that state under surrounding conditions – which is extremely important for the downstream processes, such as back injection.
A removal and loading robot removes the parts from the conditioning line and lays them in the raw component punch press. After punching, the raw components are also removed from the punch press again by the same robot. Conveyor belts carry all punch waste out of the hall to waste containers with level monitoring and a communication system which automatically informs the container service.
Between the mat magazine and the point where punched raw components are ejected toward the back injection unit, no part is touched by a human hand. FRIMO supplied the complete fully automated line, all from a single source.

Contact for further information and documentation

FRIMO Group GmbH
Martina Schierholt
Hansaring 6
D-49504 Lotte

Phone.: +49 (0) 54 04 / 8 86 - 1 57
Fax: +49 (0) 54 04 / 8 86 - 51 57
E-Mail: schierholt.m[at]frimo.com