Automated Panel Bending Center Solution for Smart Home Appliance Industry

Customer Background

The customer is a well-known domestic smart home appliance manufacturer, mainly producing refrigerators, air conditioners, washing machines and other appliances. It focuses on processing sheet metal parts such as appliance shells, liners and door panels. The products come in various specifications with mixed batch sizes, including both large-volume standard orders and small-batch customized orders.

Customer Pain Points

1.Extremely low production change efficiency: Traditional bending machines require customized special molds for different sheet metal parts, resulting in high mold costs. Mold change and adjustment take 1–2 hours, leading to low efficiency in small-batch customized orders and serious delays in delivery cycles.

2.Insufficient precision and consistency: Bending angles and dimensional accuracy of appliance sheet metal parts directly affect subsequent assembly. Traditional bending machines rely on manual experience for parameter adjustment, which easily causes deflection deformation and material springback, resulting in dimensional deviations in the same batch and high rework costs.

3.Manual sheet handling is time-consuming and labor-intensive, and easily causes collision damage to sheets, affecting product appearance and increasing production waste.

Solution

Based on the customer’s production requirements, Qingdao Dadong provides a customized PBE Series Panel Bending Center equipped with an intelligent loading and unloading robot, effectively solving the pain points of traditional bending technology and adapting to the flexible production needs of the home appliance industry.

Equipped with an intelligent programming system, it supports one-click import of 2D/3D drawings with graphical visual programming that requires no complex codes. It is also connected to the customer’s MES system to realize automatic order scheduling and intelligent process dispatch.With the intelligent loading and unloading robot, automatic sheet handling, positioning and unloading are realized. We also provide equipment operation training and full-life cycle after-sales service to ensure stable equipment operation.

Application Effects

1.Greatly improved production capacity: Multi-specification sheet metal parts can be processed without mold changes. Production change time is reduced by more than 90%, delivery cycle for small-batch customized orders shortened from 15 days to 5 days, and mass production efficiency increased by 4 times, fully solving the bottleneck of "multi-variety, small-batch" production and meeting the customization needs of the home appliance industry.

2.Significantly reduced labor costs: The entire bending system requires only one operator for equipment monitoring and material replenishment. Dependence on skilled workers is reduced, as general workers can operate after basic training, solving the shortage of skilled personnel.

3.Guaranteed precision and product consistency: Bending angle error controlled within ±0.1 mm, thickness compensation accuracy up to ±0.01 mm, dimensional consistency of the same batch improved by 99.5%, product defect rate reduced from 3% to below 0.5%, completely eliminating assembly issues and rework.