Paint manufacturer talks about production devices

1. What kind of coating would you like to produce? According to the type of coating to be produced, many different machines and equipment can be used in paint production.

The production process starts with the high speed dissolver. The most important stage in the production process is the dispersion phase. Pigments and/or  the other powder materials as calcite, talc, barite, silicate etc. used in the mill-base formulation should be mixed/dispersed in the appropriate solvent/water properly and homogeneously in order to reach finest particle size and get main properties of a coating such as hiding power, colour strength, durability, corrosion resistance, etc, exactly. After the dispersion phase, the grinding machines can also be used in order to decrease the particle size to the required point for some products production like automotive coatings, industrial coatings, etc. As a result, for a good production, dispersion should be done properly and for a good dispersion an appropriate high-speed dissolver should be used. Production starts with the high-speed dissolver and may continue with it or different machine. But any production – excluding varnish, thinner and similar products production – cannot be realised without a dissolver. That is why the high-speed dissolver is the most mportant equipment for producing coatings.

2. We may assess this topic by three titles: process efficiency, personnel efficiency and energy efficiency. In all efficiency fields, the most important technological improvement will be the usage of water based instead of solvent based products in every possible area, in the next few years.

As known, the solvent based production process is more complex and process time is generally longer compared to the water based production process. Therefore, more energy is consumed and more man-hour is used in solvent based production. R&D departments are trying to create new water borne products to substitute solvent based products. Thus, a leaner process will be realised, process complexity will be minimised, less energy will be consumed and less man-hour will be used. Besides that, the reduction of the solvent-based production will lead to less emission and hazardous waste, so waste treatment and disposal costs will be reduced. With this development all efficiencies will be enhanced. The other improvement opportunity would be related to the production method. A typical production flow is as follows; titanium dioxide and the other powders are generally purchased via silo bus or big bags and stored in silos. They are transferred from silos to hoppers and then from hoppers to dissolvers. As an example, for the production of 10,000 lt product, roughly 200-250 KW high-speed dissolver is used. Feeding of powders, dispersion time and with the other additions total production time is approximately two hours. In this time, the high-speed dissolver runs about one hour with the maximum power.

Instead of this method, a different method can be used as follows; powders in a silobus or big bags are converted to the slurry form by using an in-line mixer and then transferred to the slurry storage tank simultaneously during the unloading operation. For this method, silos, hoppers and dissolvers are not used. In-line mixers, slurry storage tanks and simple mixers will be enough for production. In-line mixers have a smaller motor size and consume less energy than dissolvers. After preparing the slurries and storage in the tanks, they are ready for use in production. Production will be like a mixture of liquids. Slurries and the other liquid materials are taken to the let-down/intermediate tank, mixed a few minutes and production is completed in a simple way. Complexity is reduced, production time is shortened, production capacity is increased, energy consumption is decreased and the man-hour is reduced. All efficiencies will be enhanced with this development.