Automatic solar panel assembly
Prefabrication of houses
The Netherlands has a tight housing market. A development such as the prefabrication of houses helps to deliver new houses more quickly and efficiently. A challenge in prefabrication is the handling of an automated process while there is an expansion of assembly elements. From Engineero we worked on optimizing an existing assembly line to enable new roof designs.
This technical issue came from an organization that builds prefab houses. A prefab house is a house built from a number of standard designed components. Building components such as walls, normal roofs and roofs including solar panels for sustainable energy solutions are manufactured in the factory and where possible pre-assembled. Because parts of a house such as the roofs with solar panels are prefabricated, the construction of a house is not delayed by bad weather conditions. In order to be able to deliver a personalized home with the standard options, there was a desire to add new roof designs to the prefab options.
Technical issue
During prefabrication, solar panels are mounted on a roof with brackets. These brackets are glued to a solar panel in a specific way during an automated process so that they can be easily mounted on the roof. However, within the current assembly line, the expansion of the number of roof designs had not been sufficiently taken into account. As a result, 20% of the brackets had to be assembled manually on the panels with a different size. In order to make the process fully automated again, the need arose to optimize the existing assembly line to enable new roof designs.
Engineering expertise
Engineero was called in for this technical issue to complete a problem analysis and to work towards a solution together with the company's engineering team. In order to identify the main causes of the assembly line problems, all bottlenecks were analysed. All bottlenecks are then grouped per area or functionality to arrive at a solution direction that can be used to tackle the problem in a cost-effective way. The documentation of all solution directions serves as the basis for the detailed engineering and design phase to enable the implementation of the solution. The ultimate goal is a fully automated assembly line for solar panels.
“It is an interesting project because there are several limitations and specifications that need to be taken into account while keeping the solutions as simple and practical as possible.” - Ryszard Zywotkiewicz
Engineering Projects
Our engineers work on technical issues and challenges in various markets. Each market requires a different expertise. Our technical specialists therefore use their knowledge and skills to provide challenging issues with the right answers. In order to find solutions together with our customers that make people's lives easier.
