Coating & Laminating
Coating system charges ahead By Tom Kerchiss, RK Print Coat Instruments
C
oatings and coated products are everywhere. They’re used for decorative, protective and
increasingly, for speciality purposes. Coatings are used for everything from our house paint all the way to coatings and glazes that civil engineers use to protect bridges and other structures from the damaging effects of the elements, which include the rain, the sun, UV light rust, salt and other spoilers. Protective coatings when applied to man- made structures can extend the life of the property and minimise maintenance regimes. When used in packaging and other industrial applications, decorative coatings make a product more presentable and easier to market. For food and beverage packaging, all those cartons, cans, bottles and labelled goods would be much more difficult to sell if they were not covered with differentiating surface coatings of inks and varnish.
ADHESIVE COATINGS Coatings of course do more than make an item look good they are often highly functional. For instance: adhesives can be coated onto cartons to seal the openings and end flaps to ensure that the item contained within the carton remains secure. In some cases, the adhesives are specially formulated to withstand demanding application and storage requirements, such
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as for example frozen food products which are subject to freeze and thaw regimes. Coatings can help to put up barriers. The packaging converter may opt to coat the fast-moving web with a PVdC or polyvinylidene coating in order to provide pharmaceutical packaging, etc., with a moisture, oxygen, water-vapour, oxygen and microbial barrier. Many changes have taken place in the coating industry in the course of the last thirty years. The formulation of coating technologies such as thermosetting emulsions, colloidal dispersions, water soluble, energy curable systems and other technologies have assisted the coating provider in meeting as far as possible, the quality and performance objectives. But for coating and consumable providers product development is for ever an on-going affair. Coating material providers and machine designers and manufacturers need to be ever on the alert to find ways of coming up with product and process solutions for customers who might be operating in sectors as diverse as packaging, automotive and electronics; all the while making sure that coating and coating/laminating processes are environmental acceptable and sustainable. To develop new coating materials, or modify existing products, there must be systems in place to trial and to coat materials onto the chosen substrate. The
purchase of suitable coating machinery including pilot coater/laminators, lab coaters, etc, must be undertaken with care. Coating is increasingly an individualistic process, customer and customer requirements differ, which is why RK Print Coat Instruments VCM built to order coating machine and a companion system, the VCML-Lab/Pilot Coater were introduced. The thickness and stiffness of a substrate
surface is just one of the processing conditions that can impact on coating quality and product performance. Substrates may exhibit the same degree of thickness but extensibility and stiffness may vary greatly. Thicker materials will not flex as easily as thinner substrates. Thinner substrates may require higher tension levels. Thinner webs and thinner coating tend to be the order of the day as many of the components or stand-alone items that are coated require thinner coatings to optimise performance. In the production of batteries, thinner filmic webs are necessary for batteries to function effectively for longer periods and at higher power output. The same is essentially the case with another energy associated item, the fuel cell.
FUEL CELLS AND BATTERIES Alessandro Volta’s method of generating a steady electrical current, a process that was known as the Volta Pile is regarded by many
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