Gonvauto Thuringen

Gonvarri Industries is a leading company in the market of flat steel and aluminium processing. With more than 60 years of experience, they produce a wide assortment of products under seven business lines, with a worldwide presence.

Their plant in Thuringen, Germany, is focused on the production of steel and aluminium blanks and slits.

The main challenge of the customer was producing parts without the use of dies and how to adapt to this new trend/technology in the market. The traditional blanking system of Gonvarri required frequent change of dies for every new reference. Also, it had big costs related to equipment and building needed to sustain the system, and due to lack of flexibility, the response time to deliver new parts to the market was also quite high.

Since 2006, Biele has developed 7 stackers for blanking lines at Thuringen plant.

Following market requirements, Biele Metal develops tailor made End of Line (EOL) stacking solutions for Laser blanking lines. Laser Blanking Lines with Biele stacking solutions provide the full advantage of laser installations regarding flexibility and productivity.

For Gonvauto Thüringen, Biele developed 2-Zone design, using Fly-by robot for interior parts stacking, Vacuum stacker for body/panel parts stacking, or both technologies for medium sized parts and shapes. Fly-by technology enables the Robot/Gripper to move in a synchronized, non stop movement (Fly-by) in accordance with the cutting sequence and line speed, hence taking the cut formats in the continuous, non stop movement out of the metal strip, leaving only the skeleton on the conveyor to be processed (scrapped).

Since commissioning in September 2021, Gonvarri increased the flexibility of the stacker and now they can handle many more stacking scenarios with it than in their other lines.

One of the big advantages of the robot stacker is that they can produce 2 different references at the same time from the same coil, stacking up to 6 blanks per reference in one stacking cycle.

Thanks to this line, Gonvarri not only reached the production, quality and competitiveness objectives, but has also managed to position itself strategically for the OEMs.

In the words of Safak Dirik, General Manager at Gonvauto Thuringen, “Biele has proven to be a very solid, efficient, and reliable partner since we started working with them. This good experience we previously had worldwide with Biele’s different stacking technologies in different Gonvarri plants, gave us the security that it was the best possible partner for our plant in Thuringen. Regarding our most recent project, Biele’s ability to develop turnkey stackers and new technologies gave us the confidence that its solution was going to be the most effective one for our new laser blanking line”.

“One of the good things of this project was that the line arrived on site already pre-assembled, and the individual components had already been tested in Biele’s factory, so that the time required for commissioning could be reduced to a minimum” said Pablo Valdés, Production Engineer at Gonvarri.

Overall, we can see that this was a successful project, which is a clear example of the long-term cooperation between Biele and Gonvarri.