An innovative process

The coil coating process which is used to produce prepainted metal is continually evolving to produce better products, higher quality, faster and with lower environmental impact. Some of the major innovations in recent years have been:

• Roller coating - the basic technique of applying paint by roller coating is at the heart of prepainted metal and continual innovation is used to make this faster, more consistent and more efficient
• No-rinse pre-treatment - the adoption firstly of reverse-cascade rinsing and then of no-rinse pre-treatment on many coil coating lines has dramatically reduced water usage in the initial stages of the process
• Curing ovens - the most energy-intensive part of the coil coating process has seen major development to provide more efficient ovens, able of curing paint in seconds, using both traditional gas-fired techniques, but also innovative induction, IR and NIR curing techniques
• VOC elimination - the coil coating process allows for very efficient collection of VOCs from the solvents used in paints and the latest oxidisers ensure that over 99% of these are destroyed without polluting the atmosphere.

Having an efficient process does not stop further innovation and technologies for the future will include new curing techniques, such as radiation curing, as well as combined pre-treatment primers and faster, smaller, even more efficient processing lines.

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The coil coating process