Space-efficient curing methods and simulation-aided coating engineering for extending lifetime of aesthetic coil coating : final report

The project 'Space-efficient curing methods and simulation-aided coating engineering for extending lifetime of aesthetic coil coating - SPACE', has been a 3.5 year six-partner research project focusing on irradiative methods to cure coatings on steel sheets produced in coil-coating lines. The project has focused on the possibilities of space-efficient curing methods and structure - property relationships as tools for the development of complex coil-coatings for exterior architectural applications. Two radiation curing methods have been studied more closely, (i) UV-curing and (ii) IR/NIR-curing. The main focus has been to see how these technologies can be used in existing coil-coating lines, but the results of the detailed studies may of course also be applied to totally new lines where radiation curing would replace conventional convective curing. The project was divided into six work packages, out of which five were concentrated on active research. All in all some 2 300 separate single measurements were performed within the project on some 50 various types of novel two and three-layer coating systems. All tests were summarised into a qualitative ranking system, made for both the reference systems and novel systems developed in the project, summarising all the performance tests done on the coating systems. The best ranking value, eight, was found for one of the two-layer reference systems and one of the newly-developed systems, a three-layer system utilising an IR-cured midcoat. The economical assessments showed that a coil-coating line producing two-layer coatings and utilising UV-curing was clearly the cheapest compared to any other case. It was further assumable that a radcure three-layer line in cheaper than a conventional three-layer line.