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Openair® plasma revolutionises precleaning in coil coating
The new 49 m long coil coating plant at Griesser AG, Switzerland, establishes a milestone in plant engineering.
At Griesser AG, Switzerland, one of Europe’s largest manufacturers of
sunshade systems the world’s first plasma pretreatment installation in
the coil coating process was brought on stream. This ensued on the
initiative and under the leadership of the project leader for coil
coating Branko Vasiljevic in close collaboration with the German
research institute Nanocraft. The Openair installation developed by
Plasmatreat here replaces an approximately 21 m long cleaning line,
i.e. unnumerable tons of chemicals and waste process water will be
rendered superfluous with immediate effect. The results are enormous
savings in costs and a maximum level of environmental conservation.
Corrosive attack on surfaces, residual contamination by sheet metal roller oils and the energy-intensive wet-chemical pretreatment processes employed at great cost to the environment in this situation right up to the present day are the most common problems in the processing of aluminium. Now for the first time a process has been developed whose use completely eliminates the above problems. This technology brings about the ultrafine cleaning of aluminium coil before the application of the conversion layer (chem-coater) and completely replaces environmentally polluting wet-chemical processes in the cleaning operations.
The Openair plasma installation which is only 2 m wide replaces a 21 m
long cleaning line and hence tons of chemicals and waste water.
In the trials conventional chemical pretreatment was used as the
reference system. Taking account of the material-plasma parameters to
be optimised (plasma focus, intensity/ energy input) it was possible to
show a distinct superiority over conventional pretreatment methods. The
results obtained prove not only the usability and high effectiveness of
atmospheric-pressure plasma but also that in all areas Openair plasma
pretreatment achieves distinctly better results than the chemical
reference procedure.
The development lead time for the new plant from the initial idea of running the cleaning installation in-line to bringing it on stream was about five years. At the same time due to the use of the Openair plasma process the speed of the entire coil coating plant has quadrupled in comparison with the old plant. The cooling and drying systems in the new plant were developed by the German company Vits Systems GmbH and the construction of the whole plant including transport of the coil and application development was the responsibility of the Swiss company Werner Mathis AG.
