New installations
2025Painting plant for truck and industrial vehicle axles
Industrial painting of automotive components: a newly developed automatic plant
Eurotherm builds a fully automated axle painting plant dedicated to the pretreatment and finishing of truck axles, developed for a leading multinational automotive company.
Managing the industrial painting of critical components such as truck and heavy-duty truck axles means dealing with a highly complex process, where each step is crucial to achieving reliable products and lasting performance. From multi-stage chemical pretreatment in the wash tunnel, to pressurized booths for automatic and manual paint application at controlled temperature and humidity, each step contributes to corrosion protection, uniformity of finish, and a high degree of weathering resistance.
Compliance with international painting and anti-corrosion treatment standards(e.g., IO 12944, ASTM B117) is an integral part of the design to ensure durability and compliance with automotive requirements. To this end, proper plant design and sizing are essential conditions to ensure consistent quality and large-scale productivity.
Axle painting plant: 1500 pieces per day with optimized productivity
The newly designed plant is equipped with a system for sorting parts via automatic loading shuttles, and RFID tracking for autonomous management of the painting cycle, which is useful for ensuring and documenting the correct execution of each process step.
Given the need to produce 1,500 parts per day in 3 shifts, a bi-rail overhead conveyor enables accumulation, bypass, and balancing between zones, and manages the accumulation time of parts at different processing stations. Thanks to the automatic overhead conveyor, parts advance at different speeds according to the transit zones to maximize the entire process and reduce cycle times.
Pretreatment and drying of truck and truck axles: the industrial painting cycle
Pretreatment of truck and truck axles in the 3-stage in-line washing tunnel includes:
- Degreasing, to remove oils, grease, chips and processing contaminants.
- Rinse with tap water.
- Rinse with recirculated reverse osmosis water and final rinse with demineralized water from pure osmosis.
After washing is complete, the axles undergo blow-off, that is, they are blasted by high-pressure air jets to remove residual water from surfaces and cavities, and reduce the heat load in the drying oven. Preliminary drying (dry-off) of the parts in the drying tunnel removes all traces of moisture and prepares the parts for subsequent painting.
Automatic axle painting and manual touch-up: quality and uniformity of finish
Two paint booths equipped with a system for controlled temperature and humidity and active aeraulic balancing (dynamic airflow balancing), handle automatic liquid painting of parts, ensuring uniform application of thick, strong films over the entire surface. A forced-ventilation desolvation room helps to ensure sufficient and controlled air exchange.
Placed immediately after the automatics, two manually operated pressurized paint booths house the operators responsible for visually inspecting the parts, who correct any surface imperfections by manually touching up the paint.
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Do you operate in OEM manufacturing or industrial truck or bus bodywork? Eurotherm supports you with custom-designed paint solutions.
Paint drying and energy efficiency: a sustainable plant for industrial vehicles
After painting, liquid paint drying takes place in the drying oven, producing uniform coatings free of surface defects that are durable and resistant to mechanical, chemical and atmospheric agents. This is followed by cooling of the parts to room temperature inside a forced-air cooling tunnel to allow safe unloading.
All heat generators in the plant are powered by hybrid electricity/hot water, combining electrical energy with heat recovered directly from the internal smelter in the production plant. By harnessing two energy sources, the heating system optimizes its operation as needed to maximize efficiency and energy savings. This solution also contributes to environmental sustainability and business continuity, in line with carbon footprint reduction goals in the automotive sector.
From axle experience to commercial vehicles: buses, coaches and vans
With this plant, Eurotherm has created a complete solution for the automatic painting of axles for industrial vehicles and heavy trucks, capable of combining productivity, certified quality and energy sustainability.
Paint systems for OEMs and industrial body shops: tailor-made solutions
The experience gained in setting up a complete painting system for truck axles and heavy industrial vehicles allows us to transfer the same skills to other areas of the automotive sector. In fact, the solutions designed for anticorrosive treatment and finishing of critical components can be adapted to the production and maintenance of buses, coaches, vans, and large commercial vehicles.
Thanks to a modular and flexible approach, the paint plant can be sized and configured to meet the productivity needs of OEMs, industrial body shops and maintenance centers, ensuring consistent quality, operator safety and energy eco-efficiency in every context.
Partners for OEMs and industrial bodyshops: custom paint facilities
Thanks to this experience, Eurotherm offers itself as a strategic partner not only for the realization of painting plants dedicated to industrial vehicle axles, but also for OEM companies, production managers and industrial body shops that need complete, safe and sustainable lines. Each project is developed with attention to the customer’s concrete objectives: increased productivity, reduced energy costs, compliance with international quality and safety standards, and process traceability according to Industry 4.0 logics. In this way, investment in a new plant translates into increased competitiveness, production reliability and business continuity.