Audi has fitted RFID to every component of the paint atomisers on 28 painting robots in the new topcoat line at its Ingolstadt plant, so that each valve, bell cup and turbine carries its own service history and gets replaced when it is actually worn rather than on a fixed schedule. The system was built by Dürr Systems on hardware from Kathrein Solutions, and Dürr announced the project in May 2024.
Dürr Systems is a German machine and plant engineering group working in automation, digitalisation and energy efficiency across 33 countries, with the automotive industry as its main market. Kathrein Solutions is a German RFID specialist that designs antennas, readers and transponders for industrial environments. The Ingolstadt topcoat line paints the interior and exterior of the Audi Q6 e-tron series, and Dürr used the same project to mark its 18,000th painting robot.
Up to 80 atomisers and no paper trail
Every Dürr atomiser is built with a quick-change device, so that if a fault appears the unit can be swapped and production restarted quickly, keeping line downtime short. The side effect is a real risk of mix-ups. A paint shop can run up to 80 atomisers, and at the maintenance benches the atomisers, bell cups, turbines, valves and shaping air rings sit close together, all needing to be identified, worked on and put back into the booth at speed.
Until the RFID system went in, the trail of which part had been in which robot, and when, was lost almost immediately. Production and maintenance sit in different locations, and the check on a part often does not happen in the same shift, which made both the communication path and the per-part documentation difficult. That history is exactly what an operator wants. To capture it, Dürr now fits every component of its latest atomiser generation, the EcoBell4, with an RFID transponder, pushing asset tracking right down to the level of a single wear part.
A new antenna geometry for a metal booth
Paint booths are metal almost everywhere, and metal shields radio signals. Conventional tags that manage long read ranges in open applications simply do not work in that environment, which is why no off-the-shelf RFID system existed for paint shops before this one. Dürr and Kathrein Solutions engineers therefore developed a transponder with its own individual antenna geometry for each component of the atomiser, with the chip and antenna range designed so the radio waves penetrate all the materials involved. Inside the booth, Kathrein Low Range antennas are used for the lowest susceptibility to interference; outside it, Wide Range antennas. Both supply the passive transponders with energy.
Three kilobytes of history on the part itself
The transponders are read-write, so operating data is recorded directly on the component rather than only in a back-end system. Each component type has its own data record: a valve reports its number of switching cycles, a bell cup its revolutions or the quantity of paint processed. From those counts a service life is calculated, which the customer can adjust to suit its own practice.
The tags use NXP UCODE DNA chips, a UHF chip family built on EPC Gen2V2 and ISO 18000-63, which makes this a RAIN RFID deployment. Storage runs to 3KB, enough for substantial information chains, and the chip carries the ISO/IEC 29167-10 crypto suite so sensitive data can be encrypted with AES 128-bit. The infrastructure also links a PC to a central database holding the RFID data for one or more paint lines, with the maintenance bench connected to the same database. Because the information lives both on the atomiser and in the database, a worker can read the current status of an atomiser and its components either at the bench or at the line.
Catching the wrong bell cup before the paint flows
Manual installation invited a specific and expensive error: a bell cup fitted in the wrong paint booth, or set up for the wrong painting process. The paint result suffered, and in practice the mistake might only surface after several bodies had been incorrectly coated, with considerable rework to follow. In the new Audi line the readers automatically identify every component by its unique identification number, and if a part has been swapped incorrectly or is missing the system warns the operator with a pop-up window before the painting process starts.
Maintenance driven by wear, not by the calendar
At the RFID maintenance bench the technician sees all the specifications of a component together with its maintenance history. That history is what makes demand-driven maintenance possible: only genuinely worn parts are replaced, so component life is used fully and maintenance cost comes down. Plant availability rises as well, because operating staff can plan maintenance in advance instead of reacting to a failure.
The bench is also set up to keep maintenance quality consistent. Video tutorials walk even semi-skilled staff step by step through each procedure, covering the right tool, the consumables needed and the actual steps for individual assembly elements or for a whole atomiser. The workstation holds the required tools and a printer, so a label showing details such as operating hours and the date of the last repair can be attached to a part. Anyone in the production plant can then see at a glance that an atomiser has been serviced and freshly reconditioned.
Paint saved, and a smaller footprint for the plant
Audi set out to make the new topcoat line both sustainable and highly productive. Rebuilding this one line accounts for half of the plant’s topcoat capacity, so the environmental gain shows up in the footprint of the whole Ingolstadt site. Much of that comes from the EcoBell4 itself: its patented 4-main-needle technology significantly reduces total paint consumption and allows a colour change in roughly four seconds with minimal loss of paint and rinsing agent. Dürr puts the paint saved at enough to produce 12,500 additional bodies, and cites lower operating costs and reduced VOC emissions. Audi is also using Dürr’s EcoSupply P colour supply system with pigging technology on the project. The RFID layer sits on top of all of it, digitalising the atomiser so processes can be optimised, errors cut and availability raised.
