Automobile and Engines

SIGMA plate heat exchangers are used worldwide throughout the entire automotive industry in the most varied production sequences.

In deformation and bending machines for plate and plastic processing, as well as in presses for the manufacture of car body parts, the hydraulic oils employed must be cooled with the aid of water.
For the improvement of the mechanical load-carrying capacity, certain construction parts must be thermally processed and hardened with the aid of oils. The quenching oils themselves must be cooled and the temperature level within the quenching baths maintained at as constant a level as possible.

Numerous processing machines have cooling circuits which perform cooling tasks in decentralized form, directly on the machine, or by means of common supply reservoirs through the integration of SIGMA plate heat exchangers.

Typical tasks for SIGMA plate heat exchangers in the automobile and supplier industries are:

  • Cooling of hydraulic and quenching oil
  • Cooling of machine coolants
  • Tempering from surface treatment baths
  • Motor test stands

Application example: Production of piston rings

For a globally active supplier of components, modules and systems for the automotive industry (both in case of original equipment and for the after-sales market), API Schmidt-Bretten has been a strategic supplier of sealed plate heat exchangers for plants domestically and internationally for more than 20 years.
Especially for the cooling of galvanic baths in the manufacture of piston rings, the well-proven SIGMA plate heat exchangers from APISchmidt-Bretten are relied on. These are generally equipped with plates made from titanium and provided with Viton seals. About 150 equipment units from API Schmidt-Bretten are in employment in the production works of this car subcontractor in Germany. 

Application example: Safety heat exchanger

We received from a German plant engineering company an order for the delivery of a total of four plate heat exchangers of the design series SIGMATWIN. These plate heat exchangers, equipped with double plates, are provided for honing oil cooling of processing machines for engine blocks. The automobile builder relies on this structural security concept, in order to avoid any contamination of the cooling-water system in case of a plate break.