Lucrezia Morabito, a member of Comau’s Advanced Automation Solutions business unit, shared with H2 View that the Italian company aims to deliver a range of strategic advantages to technology providers.
“Comau can support electrolyser, fuel cells and component producers to automate their production line,” she said, therefore increasing “decreasing costs and increase health and safety.”
Morabito added, “[We want to] ramp up and boost the adoption of electrolysers and fuel cells and hydrogen as an energy vector.”
Whilst Comau has been increasing its customer base in Europe and the US, the firm has also undertaken a project with China’s Shanghai Hydrogen Propulsion Technology (SHPT) to develop an advanced production line for its hydrogen fuel cell stacks.
“We’ve automated SHPT’s stacking procedure to manufacture PEM fuel cells,” Morabito explained. “And we’re also increasing our supplier base to have a standard automation solution with our technological partners to be fast when we have to automate production.”
The Products and Solutions Manager stressed that, despite being experienced in the field of automation, the different types of materials required for hydrogen products cause challenges.
“The operations are similar to the one we’ve done in the automotive sector, but the materials are very different – the thickness, the weight and they’re sometimes quite transparent.
“We are also working to customise our vision systems for this specific application and creating special grippers because these materials require particular specifications for handling, and this affects the cycle time that we want to respect.”
Looking ahead to 2025, Morabito stated, “We want to continue to grow in this market, increase the team and the project portfolio and present the standard solution we are developing for electrolyser and fuel cell manufacturing automation.”
