The first step in powder coating system design is to
verify that the powder coating process itself is suitable for your requirements. That is to say, will powder coating suit the nature of the items or assemblies that you wish to coat. Assemblies or extrusions with complex profiles may be difficult to coat with powder and parts with a great deal of mass, will require longer dwell times to cure than those of light construction.
Also important to be sure that the finished product will meet your requirements for quality appearance thickness salt spray, or other wear ability standards , including consideration for such processes as detailing or sublimation.
The best way to ensure a quality finish is to get the chemistry straight right from the start. The first thing you should do is contact your local powder representative and have them do a detailed analysis of your needs. This will identify the correct chemistry you’ll need to ensure quality long-lasting finish, and identify the pre-treatment stage timing that will be necessary in your system.
Once the chemistry and powder parameters have been satisfied, it’s now time to do some basic calculations to determine the speed of the system and the capacity of the system either per hour or per shift. With powder coating equipment this is usually done in feet per minute and is a fairly simple calculation to perform.
Simply take the number of pieces you wish to produce per shift and divide that number of hours in the shift by 50. So for example, say you need to powder coat 3000 parts per eight hour shift. In that case the formula would be 3000 divided by the total of 8×50 or 400. That would bring design line speed to 7.5 ft. per minute.
Once the line speed has been determined and the chemistry dwell times are known it’s simply a matter of multiplying the dwell time of each stage to determine the length of the pretreatment washer and dryer often cure oven’s. For more information regarding design considerations. Please refer to our powder coating publication library.