Over the last six decades, automation and robotics have advanced how functional industrial coatings are applied and used. The results have included better precision of coating processes, lower costs, and improved product performance.
George Osterhout, Orion’s senior advisor and former president, authored the following article featured in Design World magazine.
Functional coatings have been used in industrial applications since the Industrial Revolution. Today, functional coatings are advanced formulations that resolve friction, sticking, corrosion, noise, and abrasion issues — and delivering FDA compliance in some cases. Other benefits include increasing the value and lifespan of finished products and components in aerospace, defense, automotive, food processing, agriculture, chemical processing, consumer goods, and manufacturing applications.
The 1960s to 1980s saw an array of mechanical methods to situate parts closer together and more uniformly apply coatings. Parts being coated were advanced past a coating station either manually or via a chain-on-edge conveyor. Back then, indexing machines were hard to control. Workers had to make do with pulleys, belts, and gears, as variable-speed servomotors weren’t yet an option. So, the technology necessitated mechanical advancing of the spray gun to apply the coating as parts shuttled by.
Parts not conveyable by chain-on-edge machinery were manually sprayed, and it was the workers’ eye-hand coordination combined with the tooling design that influenced how efficiently coating could be applied. When coating complex shapes, an overhead conveyor was often also used. Parts were coated one at a time and hung on the conveyor to be cured at 200 to 700° F (depending on the coating applied) to make them perform as designed.
Today, there are two distinct branches of coating automation. The first is for coating cookware and bakeware via simpler processes evolved from the original one-coat application of the 1970s to today’s trio of primer, intermediate coat, and a topcoat. This coating-application process is done on chain-on-edge equipment while rotating the pans … and requires a large amount of coating material to reach coating thicknesses of 0.0018 to 0.0023 in. per side.
In contrast, far less coating is needed for industrial applications (as in automative, aerospace, and manufacturing equipment). These typically involve multifaceted parts needing tighter tolerances and coating thicknesses of 0.0003 to 0.0008 in. per side.
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