Attractivechina Completed Lizhong (Mexico) Aluminum Alloy Wheel Coating Line Project

In May 2026, the aluminum alloy wheel coating line project for Lizhong (Mexico) Co., Ltd., undertaken by Guangdong Chuangzhi Intelligent Equipment Co., Ltd. (brand name: Attractivechina), was successfully delivered and put into mass production. Located in Mexico, this project marks another milestone for Attractivechina in the overseas high-end automotive parts coating equipment market, fully demonstrating the company's technical strength in aluminum alloy wheel coating and its ability to deliver international projects.

Customer Requirements: High Standards Demand Rigorous Specifications

As critical safety and appearance components of automobiles, aluminum alloy wheels demand coating quality that directly affects driving safety and vehicle aesthetics. The coating process for aluminum alloy wheels is extremely demanding, involving pretreatment, powder primer coating, basecoat application, and clearcoat finishing – each step imposing strict requirements on equipment precision, cleanliness, and stability. With the global automotive industry rapidly advancing toward lightweighting and personalization, the market demand for aluminum alloy wheels continues to grow, and requirements for coating efficiency, coating quality, and environmental standards have reached unprecedented levels.

As a global leader in the aluminum alloy wheel industry, the Lizhong Group chose Mexico as its North American production base as part of its globalization strategy, aiming to serve major North American OEMs locally. Facing the extremely high quality standards of the North American wheel coating market and Mexico's stringent local environmental regulations, the client set high requirements for the coating line's automation level, process consistency, energy consumption control, and environmental emissions. Leveraging its extensive experience and strong technical capabilities in aluminum alloy wheel coating, Attractivechina stood out among several international competitors and successfully won the project.

Technical Solution: Full-Process Intelligent Coating Solution

Tailored to the specific characteristics of aluminum alloy wheel coating and the client's personalized needs, Attractivechina designed a full-process intelligent coating solution covering complete processes including pretreatment, water drying, powder primer coating, basecoat application, clearcoat coating, curing, and final inspection.

1. Intelligent Conveying and Robotic Automatic Workpiece Transfer System

The project adopts an accumulating overhead conveyor system to ensure smooth transportation and precise positioning of workpieces. The system features accumulation functionality, allowing buffering and temporary stopping of workpieces on the line, effectively accommodating cycle time differences between various process stages and ensuring continuous and flexible production.

A key technological highlight of the entire line is the robotic automatic workpiece transfer system. Traditional aluminum alloy wheel coating lines typically rely on manual labor or mechanical flipping mechanisms to adjust workpiece orientation when wheels move between different spraying stations, resulting in low efficiency and limited positioning accuracy. This project employs dedicated robots combined with a vision positioning system to automatically perform gripping, flipping, and orientation adjustments of wheels between spraying stations, enabling precise switching between the wheel face, back, and inner rim surfaces. The robotic automatic transfer system offers the following technical advantages:

• High-precision positioning: The vision system identifies the wheel's position and posture, and the robot automatically adjusts the gripping angle to ensure that every wheel enters the spraying station with precise positioning, providing a stable working baseline for the spraying robots.
• Fully automatic unmanned operation: From loading, posture conversion, to unloading, the entire process requires no manual intervention, greatly reducing operator labor intensity while eliminating the impact of human factors on product quality.
• Flexible compatibility with multiple varieties: The system automatically recognizes wheels of different sizes and types, adaptively adjusting gripping strategies and transfer paths to perfectly support the client's mixed-model production requirements.
• Cycle time optimization: The robot transfer system operates with high speed and accurate positioning, coordinating seamlessly with the spraying robots' rhythm, effectively eliminating bottlenecks at the transfer stage and significantly improving the overall production cycle time.

2. Robotic Automatic Spraying System

The spraying section is equipped with multiple explosion-proof spraying robots employing electrostatic rotary bell spraying technology, enabling comprehensive automatic coating of the wheel face, back, and inner rim surfaces. The robot system features a high-precision flow control system and an automatic color-change device, allowing rapid switching between different colors and paint types to meet the client's diverse, small-batch production needs. Through offline programming and simulation, spraying paths are optimized, paint utilization is significantly improved, and coating uniformity and appearance quality meet North American OEM certification standards.

3. Intelligent Inspection and Quality Control

The line is equipped with an online visual inspection system that performs real-time, multi-point detection of coated wheel surfaces, accurately identifying common coating defects such as sags, orange peel, particles, and color differences. Defective parts are automatically diverted and alarms triggered. The system also features quality traceability, recording full-process process parameters for each wheel, providing data support for quality analysis and process optimization.

4. Energy-Saving and Environmental Protection System

To comply with Mexico's stringent environmental regulations, the project includes a high-efficiency exhaust gas treatment system using regenerative thermal oxidation (RTO) technology to thoroughly purify VOCs generated during spraying and curing processes, with emission indicators far exceeding local environmental standards. Additionally, the system is equipped with a waste heat recovery unit that recovers and reuses hot exhaust gases from high-temperature ovens through heat exchange, effectively reducing overall energy consumption and delivering substantial economic and environmental benefits to the client.

5. Digital Intelligent Centralized Control Platform

The entire production line is integrated with Attractivechina's self-developed digital intelligent centralized control system, enabling real-time monitoring and automatic adjustment of key parameters such as temperature, humidity, pressure, flow rate, and air velocity across all process sections. The system supports production data collection, analysis, and report generation, providing decision-making support for production management. It also features remote operation and maintenance capabilities, allowing Attractivechina's technical team to perform remote diagnostics and maintenance through the cloud platform, ensuring stable equipment operation.

Core Advantages: Technical Expertise Lays the Foundation for Quality

Attractivechina possesses deep technical expertise and extensive engineering experience in aluminum alloy wheel coating. The company has provided over a hundred coating production lines to numerous well-known wheel manufacturers both domestically and internationally. In the field of aluminum alloy wheel coating, the company has secured multiple core patents covering key technologies such as dedicated wheel clamping devices, tracking and transfer devices, and automatic spraying equipment. As of 2026, Attractivechina has accumulated 77 invention patents and a total of more than 200 patents and software copyrights, firmly establishing its technical leadership in the industry.

In terms of overseas project delivery, Attractivechina has accumulated rich experience in international project management. The company's products have been exported to many countries and regions, including Thailand, Vietnam, India, Indonesia, Iran, Bangladesh, Singapore, Russia, Pakistan, the United States, and Mexico. The company is well-versed in the full-process management of overseas projects—from design, manufacturing, shipping, installation, commissioning to final acceptance—and can effectively address challenges such as standard discrepancies, logistics complexities, and on-site construction management in cross-border projects.

Project Outcomes: Efficient Delivery Wins Client Trust

The project was completed on schedule and successfully put into production in May 2026. Since its commissioning, the production line has operated stably, achieving a first-pass yield of over 98% for spray coating, increasing paint utilization by approximately 30% compared to traditional spraying methods, reducing overall energy consumption by about 15% relative to the design baseline, and achieving VOCs emissions far superior to local environmental standards. The client highly praised the project's automation level, coating quality, energy-saving and environmental performance, and Attractivechina's professional services. The successful launch of this project not only significantly enhanced the client's production capacity and quality competitiveness in the North American market but also laid a solid foundation for Attractivechina's further expansion into the Americas market.

Looking ahead, Guangdong Chuangzhi Intelligent Equipment Co., Ltd. will continue to uphold its mission of "setting a new benchmark in the coating industry and making coating easier." With over three decades of dedicated focus on the coating sector, the company remains committed to providing superior digital and intelligent coating solutions to customers worldwide.