Accelerate Your Products Dry Time To Increase Your Paint Line Production

If your paint line is the bottleneck for production of your facility you may want to consider one of two options to reduce drying time significantly. The key is to know the primary coatings you work with, are they water or solvent based coatings. The type of coating you utilize will determine which way of accelerating dry time is correct for your application.

Solvent based coatings harden as the solvent evaporates from the coating allowing for the coating to harden and adhere to the parts surface. To accelerate the drying time of solvent based coatings you need elevated heat to accelerate the evaporation of solvent. To know how much acceleration you can expect from increasing heat you should review your coating data sheet with your coating manufacturer. Within the sheet there will be a section that discusses dry time based on room temperature and elevated temperature. Specifically, you are typically looking for a dry to ship time as this is when the coating is sufficiently dry to be packaged for delivery. The difference between these numbers is the approximate increase in production you could potentially experience. For example, if dry to ship time at room temperature is 4 hours and with heat is 2 hours you could expect to roughly double your production.

Water based coatings require that moisture is removed from the coating to promote faster hardening of the coating. To achieve this velocity of air is required, the faster air moves over the surface of the finished product the quicker it will dry. For water based coatings what is required then are air blowers that will forcefully move air over your finished product resulting in reduced drying time. 

So there you have it if your looking to improve production you have to know the coatings you use and select the appropriate method to reduce dry time. By choosing the right selection you can often times double production.