The challenge

On behalf of global automotive supplier LEONI, Abele Ingenieure developed and erected a fully automated manufacturing cell for producing aluminium busbars for passenger car drive systems. The facility, located in Romania, is the first of its kind and is used to manufacture round aluminium bars which serve to provide the power connection between the rear-mounted battery and the power users in the engine compartment. Previously, the partially automated production had an output of some 15,000 busbars per year. In the new facility, output has been increased to up to 750,000 busbars per year – and rising. What’s more, the production unit can now be operated fully automatically or semi-autonomously (one-piece-flow principle).

Our solution

Our engineers faced the challenge of coming up with nothing less than brand-new concepts and ideas for the future of traffic and mobility. In the system we’ve now created, aluminium raw parts insulated with a halogen-free polyethylene sheathing are stripped twice and pressed before being subjected to a meticulous cleaning, welded and then bent in a three-dimensional free-standing manner, by means of a CNC bending machine. The bending of the rail elements is the core process of the system, which was optimised to enable the manufacture of a finished busbar every 30 seconds. Abele Ingenieure also developed a complex handling system to enable the ideal convergence of all production processes for extraordinarily speedy and efficient sequences.