The market for powder coating is experiencing fast growth in recent years, strongly driven by the automotive industry as well as electrical and other appliances industries. At the same time, it becomes more and more critical to design powder coating processes as cost efficiently as possible while maintaining and improving the quality of the powder coating process itself.
A common challenge while working with powder coating materials are agglomerates. In order to deal with these difficult to process agglomerates, the powder coating materials will be screened by means of a cyclone screener. Manufacturers of powder coating material screen their product prior packing them into 25kg or 50kg bags before sending them to customers in the automobile, electrical or other appliances industries. This is a basic method to ensure that powder coating material has the correct particle size. To ensure a constant quality during the powder coating process, users screen the received powder coating prior processing it further to the spray gun.
Commonly the powder is delivered in bags and emptied into a dumping station. A cyclone screener is located after the dumping station, either below or directly on top of the powder coating system. When entering the screener, the active paddles of the screener will disintegrate the agglomerates before the powder coating enters the next process step. Once the powder has passed through the sieve at the properly screened particle size, it can safely be transported through the powder coating system. This is to avoid that agglomerates or foreign particles enter the spray gun and cause non-uniform coloring of the receiving parts. In this way, AZO can ensure consistent quality of powder coating processes.
As a result, waste production can be minimized, costs can be reduced, and the efficiency of the process can be increased.
The picture below shows the function of an AZO cyclone screener.
In addition, the powder coating process can be further optimized. A state-of-the-art solution to improve the efficiency of the powder coating process is to implement a powder recovery system. The principal is simple: The excess powder that is sprayed past the work pieces to be coated falls into a collecting tray where it is collected and transferred to the aspiration filter. From the filter the powder is returnedto the AZO cyclone screening machine by a suction conveyer system. The cyclone screener then eliminates agglomerates, lumps, and other impurities that may have been created during the spraying process. The powder obtained in this way is fed back to the spraying process. Like this, the amount of wasted powder coat is minimized while quality is maintained.
The investment into a powder recovery system pays for itself thanks to the savings made in the use of raw materials. AZO's cyclone screeners facilitate the recovery process and increase competitiveness by ensuring a constant quality of the powder.
For further information of screening powder coating please contact us here or directly our representatives in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore or the Philippines.
