Automotive Industry
Automotive Industry
The automotive industry is known for pushing its boundaries in technology.
SPS & ATMA have been working in very close cooperation with many of the leading (sub) suppliers to famous automobile brands like Mercedes, BMW, Volkswagen, Audi, Fiat, Ferrari, Nissan and many others. Today, screen printing is the preferred technology for many applications within the automotive industry like screen printing automotive dials, seat heating, all kind of sensors, IMD / FIM part manufacturing and flat or even slightly curved cover glass for digital car instrument panels. If we also take into account the larger glasses like windshields, side shields, rear window & sun roofs we can clearly see the importance of screen printing for the automotive industry.
For automations and specific screen printing solutions, both the ATMA range of flat-bed screen printing machines as well as the original SPS STOP cylinder screen printing machines are excellent production machines. Traditional automotive dials can have as many as 12 colours screen printed in perfect registration and with very close tolerance in terms of color density. For precise control, the robust SPS high-tech squeegee system, combining pneumatics, electronics and hydraulics (PEH) is unchallenged!
For instrument glass cover panels ATMA offers multi-color screen printing lines based on camera registration controlled flat-bed screen printing machines that can include various extra’s like plasma treatment, automatic density control, jet air and/or UV curing, AOI systems, accumulators and more. Please ask for specific models.
An impressive example of a 4-color automotive cockpit glass screen printing line. Starting with a robot unloading the prior washing machine, initial poka-yoke check on the glass position, followed by a buffer station with a capacity of one complete washing unit, 2 stations with plasma treatment, camera registration station, screen printing station, UV curing unit, density check as well as AOI. The line consists of a total of 4 printing stations, in the end the material runs into a high-temperature industrial dryer. All together there are 54 pc of glass on its way (excluding glass in the end dryer)!
General suitable machine types for this industry would be:
ATMATIC MF66/F with very close tolerance (≤15 µ) and available in various stages of automation. ATMA AO series with manual or automatic substrate loading.
The SPS STOP cylinders XP57 primeline as well as the recently new introduced, fully servo driven and camera registration control type SPS ASTRON QX57, both in combination with the single-sheet front pick-up SPS FP.
Depending on the inks, both the conveyor jet air dryers SPS TURBOSTAR-CBS as well as long-time dryers SPS UNITHERM will fulfil the requirements.