Robotic Manufacturing

© Siemens AG

The manufacturing cell is a further development of a pilot plant from the EU project AREUS. It is operated at the Daimler plant in Sindelfingen and serves to investigate the aspects of energy distribution, EMC, dynamic load balancing and energy management. Within the cell, 4 welding robots simulate a sub-process from car body construction. The system also comprises an active front-end for AC/DC conversion, mechanical, chemical and electrical energy storage systems and a DC-DC converter for feeding solar energy into the grid. The energy is distributed via a DC track system. The division into several load zones makes it possible to test protection and switching scenarios. The integration of a welding application (aluminium spot welding) with extremely high power peaks is an impressive demonstration of how storage can be used, enabling the reduction of the originally required feed-in power of 450 kVA to 50 kVA.

Key Research Topics

• High peak power demands for welding application
• Implementation of three different energy storage solutions
• Integration of photovoltaic energy
• Energy management for highly flexible load demands
• Energy distribution via power rails