About Us > Equipment Manufacturing Base

The workshop stretches 216 meters long and 72 meters wide, of which three zones cover an area of about 15,000 square meters in total. Zone A is a reserved space for our machine processing line that is planned to be put into use in 2024. Zone B is a hydrogen refueling station assembly line with an annual capacity of 20 sets of hydrogen refueling stations. Zone C is a hydrogen producing equipment assembly line with an annual capacity of 2.0GW alkaline water electrolyzers. The construction of the entire production line started in January 2023, and was completed and put into use in March 2023, which reflected the speed of SANY and also our advantages in the field of equipment manufacturing.

Available in September 2023, and independently developed by the SANY Robotics R&D team, the welding robot work station consists of a truss unstacking system, a robotic handling system, a laser welding system, a visual recognition system, and a bipolar plate flipping system. In every 5 minutes, a bipolar plate is welded with the electrode mesh, and a circular pressure plate then rolls off the assembly line. The entire process from feeding, flipping, blanking to welding is fully automated by robotic equipment. The manufacturing process is not only efficient, but also standardized, which can avoid damages to the bipolar plate coating during handling and rotation, greatly improving product quality.

Spot welding is used for the fixation of round tablets. Compared with the traditional gluing technology, the spot welding is superior in the following aspects. First, it avoids the detachment. It has been verified by experiments that the adhesive of the round tablet would be melted and peeled off by the alkali solution during the operation of the electrolyzer, which then remains in the pressure pipe, posing a great impact on the performance. Second, it enables the firm fixation, reducing the risk of misalignment and falling during the assembly process. Third, it improves efficiency. The traditional gluing technology requires 15 minutes for drying, which affects the overall efficiency of assembly. No waiting time is required for the spot welding technology.

Put into use in August 2022, this A6-2525 automated PPS separator cutter has an effective operation area of 2500 mm×2500 mm. Equipped with infrared positioning and high precision linear guide rails and pinions, it can achieve an cutting accuracy of ± 0.5 mm. It is also equipped with a 12.5 KW fan that ensures the flattening of the separator through vacuum adsorption to provide consistent cutting. The automatic feeding device made up of the feeding bearing, cylinder and belt ensures the flattened separator conveys to the cutting station automatically, enabling unmanned feeding and cutting.

The automatic electrode laser welding machine was put into use in December 2022. With the dominant PLC controlling, it is compatible for 1000 to 2500 mm electrode welding. It adopts a powerful 1500W or above continuous laser welding unit, a flat platform with movable fixtures for multi-point clamping of the bipolar plate to remove the Z-axis unevenness, and the rotary table shifts less than 0.5 mm on the Z axis with no focal length deviation of the laser welding. The pressing block adopts an arc-like design to fully press the parts. Through trial programming, it can finish the welding of an entire bipolar plate all at once by automatically skipping the hollow part in the middle. Every time the welding is completed, the turntable automatically returns to the nearest starting point of welding. Laser welding with filler wire achieves the accuracy of 0.5 mm. The welding seam is even, delicate and smooth, and the surface is white and bright.

SANY's hydrogen separation and purification system is powered by our self-developed intelligent pipeline design platform, which ensures an annual production capacity of more than 160 sets. The assembly area consists of a final assembly unit and a pipeline prefabrication unit. The final assembly unit can efficiently assemble 5 sets of separation and purification systems at the same time, and the pipeline prefabrication unit involves the blanking, bending, welding and prefabrication of pipelines. The production line has 5 separation system assembly stations and 5 purification system assembly stations, independent pipeline welding stations, pipeline slope cutting and bending stations, and air tightness test stations to achieve the unified process from pipeline prefabrication, overall assembly to end-of-line testing, which is able to deliver one set of separation and purification system in 10 days.

Pipe Bender: Two sets of CNC benders are used. Currently, they can only bend 0-40 mm pipes with the accuracy of 0.05 mm. We are developing the bending technique for pipes in a larger diameter, which is planned to be put into use in 2024.

Automatic Pipeline Cutting and Beveling Line: The line consists of a pipeline feeding system, a hydraulic rotation system, a length measurement system, a cutting and beveling machine, a laser coding system, a discharging system, a material retrieval system, etc., which realizes the entirely automatic process from raw materials onto the line to finished pipelines off the line. Its processing accuracy is less than 0.5 mm. The efficiency is increased by more than 3 times, and it can handle up to Φ350mm pipes.

Pipe Bender: Two sets of CNC benders are used. Currently, they can only bend 0-40 mm pipes with the accuracy of 0.05 mm.

Automatic Pipe Welding Machine: It can automatically weld the straight pipes and straight pipes, straight pipes and bent pipes, straight pipes and tees in thickness of 2-10 mm and diameters of 0-400 mm. It uses the argon arc welding technique, which is more than three times faster than manual welding. It also greatly improves the welding quality. Currently, the first-pass rate of flaw detection exceeds 99%. The welds are processed using a weld cleaning machine imported from Germany, which allows better antioxidant capacity than that of the traditional pickling and passivation treatment. The cleaning is environmentally friendly with no waste liquid.

The electrolyzer assembly station is made for the final assembly of electrolyzers, consisting of 5 sets in total. Each set uses a flexible design to meet the production needs of up to 3,000 Nm3/h. Each assembly station is composed of a hydraulic hoisting platform and a screw drive lifter. The hydraulic hoisting platform realizes the assembly requirements at the height of 0 to 7.5 meters, and the screw drive lifter significantly simplifies the total assembly process, which also saves a great amount of plant vertical space, eliminating the plant height limitation issue. The electrolyzer assembly process uses positioning pins and sophisticated 5-line laser leveling technique to ensure a precise stack assembly outcome (the vertical deviation of the electrolyzer to be within 5 mm). The 18-axis hydraulic tensioner completely eliminates inefficient actions such as frequent disassembly and assembly of tensile screws during the tightening process, reduces the workload on employees, and doubles the efficiency.

Electrolyzer Assembly Process:

Vertical Stacking Control Process for Large Electrolyzers: It enables the control over the stacking of bipolar plates in vertical and circumferential directions through standardized measures such as five-line levels and positioning pins. Currently, the vertical deviation of 1000 Nm³/h electrolyzers can be controlled within 5mm.

Tightening Process for Electrolyzers: The 18-axis tightening process is adopted. All parameters of the three major techniques including cold tightening, heat tightening, and final tightening are under control. The distance between hemispherical poles is evenly controlled at 0.3mm, and the overall tightening deviation is less than 3 mm.

The gasket cutter adopts an aerospace-grade aluminum honeycomb adsorption panel, by utilizing profiling tools, negative pressure vacuum and infrared calibration to achieve fixing and positioning of gaskets. During gasket processing, a combination of vibrating cutter and milling cutter is used for hole, groove and step surface processing, and the final product has an overall accuracy of 0.5 mm.

The pipeline prefabrication area mainly consists of pipe cutting, pipe bending, pipe welding, and pipe pre-assembly. Pipe cutting involves the cutting and beveling of stainless steel pipes. The main equipment includes band saws, beveling machines, and semi-automatic cutting and beveling integrated machines, meeting the production requirements for pipe diameters ranging from 0 to 400 mm. Pipe bending is carried out using two sets of CNC bending machines to meet the bending needs of pipes ranging from 0 to 40 mm, with a bending accuracy of up to 0.05 mm. Pipe welding employs a fully automatic pipe welding machine to fulfill automatic welding requirements for straight-to-straight pipes, straight-to-bent pipes, and straight pipes to tees within the thickness range from 2 to 10 mm and diameter range from 0 to 400 mm. The use of argon arc welding technology achieves a welding speed of over three times that of manual welding. Weld seams are treated using a German-imported weld seam cleaning machine, which provides oxidation resistance surpassing traditional acid pickling and passivation processes, ensuring that the cleaning process generates no waste liquid, thus being environmentally friendly. For pipe pre-assembly, specialized combination fixtures with a positioning accuracy of 0.5 mm are utilized, meeting the assembly and positioning requirements of pipe assemblies. This facilitates offline batch pre-assembly of pipe assemblies and fulfills the requirements for online assembly, serving as a crucial step in achieving large-scale production for the separation and purification system.