The new facility that is being built at the Ford base in Dunton will include several new cutting-edge machines, some of them arriving from abroad. Over the past few months, despite travel restrictions imposed by the coronavirus, the E:PriME consortium has successfully managed the approval of a new trickle impregnation machine, which arrived at Dunton from Germany in May.
The ambition of E:PriME is to assist Ford in its journey towards electrification, creating a new facility with machines and a training area at its base in Dunton. New images have just been released showcasing the great progress already reached. More details in the image captions in the in the Gallery.
Future Powertrain Conference (FPC2020) is a two-day UK event which brings together industry and academic experts in the field of powertrain development. Presentations and discussions are held on the solutions to challenges faced by the engineering industry in the UK and internationally over the next ten years. With over 50 presenters and more than 200 companies attending, this event is seen as key to helping strengthen the UK engineering community and to meeting future challenges. This year the conference took place on 4th and 5th March, at the National Motorcycle Museum in Solihull.
In the summer of 2019, the first e-drive assembly machines arrived in the E:PriME pilot facility, located at Ford’s Dunton Campus. The new machines will aid the project to upskill the Ford UK team and other consortium members in the manufacture of electrified powertrains.
The E:PriME facility houses a low-volume rotor manufacturing line, which is made up of three operations: rotor assembly, balancing and magnetisation.
"The Automotive industry is going through significant upheaval, our products, our customer base and the way we drive is changing. This highlights the need for us to be smarter and faster, and the manufacturing engineering process needs to change to support this”.
This was the key theme running through the recent panel discussion by members of the E:PriME consortium at the Industry 4.0 Summit and Expo, where the group discussed the adoption of digital technologies to support the manufacture of complex systems.
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