April 2, 2019

How to avoid paint defects in automotive?

What if you could avoid paint defects when producing a new vehicle?

With the future needs of millions of electric vehicles, it has become essential to produce at high speed without any bumps on the road. In order to reduce the production costs while maintaining a high quality and speed, a flawless process is necessary.

One important part of this process is painting and coating. All vehicles need to be painted and coated without any foreign particles being attached during the process, in order to avoid paint related defects on the car body. What if the solution to avoid paint related defects was to spray another component in the air?

Environment free of airborne contamination

How can you achieve a working environment, in an industrial plant, free of airborne contamination? In an automotive factory, there is always contamination of the air by some microscopic particles like dust, paint cracks, hair, etc.

That is why there are several methods to prevent the contamination from one room to the other when the car is moving on a continuous line.

To mention a few:

Sticky tape gates
Air nozzles gates
Anti-static measures
Dust control measures

Often factories use a combination of several measures in order to achieve a room with no airborne contamination.

Humidification as anti-static and dust control measure

What if spraying small water droplets for humidity control would be the solution for both anti-static measure and dust control?

Spraying small droplet size of water in the air will:

humidification in automotive

catch particles in the air and weight them down;
add humidity which will help to avoid electrical static discharge from happening;
cover a bigger area as small droplets are lighter and less influenced by gravity thus more able to travel further away;
never break and wet the area as they have a higher surface/volume ratio compare to larger droplets.