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Due to current environmental and health policy requirements, the reduction of energy and use of sustainable raw materials, while at the same time sustainably improving economic, technological and environmental aspects, is a central concern of paint raw material suppliers, paint manufacturers and industrial paint users.
The industrial coating of metal components in Germany and Europe is a multi-billion euro market. On the one hand, it serves to protect against corrosion, but should also meet the visual requirements of the user. One of the coating technologies under consideration here is powder coating application. It has many advantages, such as the non-use of solvents, a high degree of automation, high coating quality, lower material consumption and high cost-effectiveness due to powder recovery. According to the current state of the art, the limitations lie in the curing temperatures of approx. 180-220°C established on the market, i.e. there is a high energy consumption. Many raw materials are traded on the world market, i.e. there are long transportation routes, no influence on availability and the purchase price. Furthermore, some pigments are harmful to health or poorly available due to problematic supply chains (e.g. TiO₂, heavy metals)[1].
For these reasons, the project partners iLF Magdeburg GmbH, Ganzlin Beschichtungspulver GmbH and Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg have set themselves the ambitious goal of developing a sustainable powder coating. All raw materials should come from Europe and be renewable and biodegradable. Furthermore, these coatings should be processed using standard application technology, but also require the lowest possible processing temperatures in order to be able to produce economically and in an environmentally friendly manner in times of massively rising energy costs. The aim of the development is for the coating to achieve the service life of the components without any loss of function and to offer a wide range of industrial applications with the highest demands on product performance. By reducing the curing temperatures to approx. 130 °C, the aim is to achieve energy savings of 30-50 %.

Furthermore, powder coating offers the possibility of recovering the proportion of powder not used during the coating process (overspray). Here, almost complete utilization of the starting material can be achieved.
This text was translated with DeepL

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