Among the luxury car brands, Volvo is the first to bring forward a comprehensive electrification strategy. The advent of this strategy is not only a natural replacement from the technological side of view, but also an implementation on the sustainable mobile traveling as well as on the commitment to energy conservation and emission reduction. One way to achieve this goal is to increase the output of its core EDU product- the MEP series.

As an expert in the field of intelligent equipment for NEVs, Haosen quickly responded to customer needs and developed a brand new 2nd generation MEP EDU assembly line. This line features compatibility for 3 types of MEP2 variants, a cycle time less than 54s/set and an annual output of 300k unit. It is also strictly following the high production standards as well as the ergonomic requirements from the European customer.

It is understood that the project has currently started trial production in the Volvo plant in Skövde, Sweden. This is the first ever assembly line delivered to Volvo from overseas by a Chinese supplier. This successful delivery also means that, the globally supplied Volvo MEP2 EDU products are all rolling off Haosen equipment and its global production efficiency is also increased by 150%.

Solutions

For Haosen, the project is facing many complex model-specific designs as well as challenges on process implementation. While at the same time, customer brings forward more rigid ergonomic requirements according to the European manufacture standard. Haosen shall not only preserve more imagination space for the upcoming upgrading and modification, but also give full consideration for the sustainable development of the operators.

Therefore, Haosen is satisfying customer’s requirement on cycle time by means such as work process splitting & merging, equipment structure optimization and man-machine cooperative production. Normally the marriage process of differential and transmission housing can only be achieved with 4 stations, which is a common solution by suppliers in the industry, anyhow, Haosen managed to reduce it to 2 stations, and the lifting device in the machine is compatible for as much as 6 work pieces, and the design is also meeting man-machine spacing standard while easy for operation. Such a lifting device can be referred as “top class” among the peer lifting devices in terms of either flexibility, functionality, or complexity, cycle time. In order to improve the efficiency, Haosen also designed a transaxle support mounting cell which made it possible for one same robot to complete the transfer for multiple work process. Moreover, automated tightening and leak testing scheme are also adopted.

The “high standard” of the customer Volvo is reflected in the strict control of data.

Merely taking the gear ring press station as an example, it was required by the customer that on the premises of ensuring work piece quality, after being pressed to contact, the flatness of the entire gear ring should not exceed 0.01mm by inspection, which was bringing forward even more challenging requirement to Haosen. During the assembling and commissioning process, Haosen managed to limit this value to within 0.008mm and it had been verified that the tested data was stable over a long period of time. This is the highest accuracy indicator ever achieved during the past accuracy adjustment processes for pressing machines.

"Safety" that Volvo is extremely concerned about is also reflected in the production process. The height of the equipment, the man-machine spacing and the rotation angle of work pieces are all within the design considerations. In order to meet the requirements of ergonomics, Haosen even changed a semi-auto station to a fully-auto station.

Apart from tackling with the technical difficulties, Haosen must deal with the delivery issues in a background of global epidemics. A commitment on delivery shall not be let down. In order to highlight the speed and quality from a Chinese make, Haosen was actively coordinating with internal & external resources and joining hands with Haosen German subsidiary as well to ensure the arrival of material supplies in a timely manner. Each and every window period was thoroughly utilized to ensure for the project progress.

Volvo the customer gives rather high praise for this cooperation with Haosen:

“It has been a big challenge as this project started in the middle of the COVID-19 era, and it has been a big challenge for us. However, all team members have contributed with passion of never giving up and using the capability’s needed. Together with Haosen team we have been successfully installing the complete line. Haosen has been doing a tremendously good job！And the quality of the stations, the quality of the work has been outstanding. We are very happy to have been worked with Haosen team as for all of the members from the project.”

MEP series products are core EDU products for Volvo Cars. In year 2021, Haosen won a lifelong honorable prize - the Volvo Cars Quality Excellence Award for the outstanding performance in the MEP1 & MEP2 EDU assembly line projects. This award is also the highest honor of recognition by Volvo Car Group on the quality of Haosen product. This cooperation shows that, as a qualified partner supplier of Volvo, Haosen is once again speeding up the electrification transformation process for the customer and it also embodies global delivery strength of Haosen.

For Haosen, this project is the first EDU project completely exported to Europe, and it is an important node for the new energy business of Haosen to go abroad. Haosen will sum up the experience from this successful delivery, constantly improve, take hold of the opportunity and join hands with customers, thus the global trust can be expected soon!