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Aluminium 2008 –
Plasmatreat holds international press conference
At this year’s Aluminium 2008 in Essen, Germany, Plasmatreat invited international technical journalists and representatives of the industry to a press conference.
This was occasioned by two world novelties in the field of atmospheric-pressure plasma pretreatment of aluminium introduced on an industrial scale in the last two years. These are:
- the use of Openair® plasma in the coil coating process at Griesser AG, Switzerland – a process that replaces all use of wet chemicals in the precleaning of aluminium coil;
- the PlasmaPlus® polymerisation process employed by TRW Automotive, Germany, for corrosion protection in diecast aluminium housings for motor pump units - a process which for the first time allows plasma coating without low pressure, i.e. without a costly vacuum chamber, but rather in-line under normal atmospheric conditions.
After a welcoming address by the moderator Inès Melamies, PR expert of the management consultancy Blue Rondo International, the managing director of Plasmatreat, Dipl.-Ing. Christian Buske, opened the series of lectures with an overview of the global expansion of the plasma company since its foundation in 1995.
Ing. Dipl.-Oek. Carlo Graf, head of the Colours Product Center at one of Europe’s leading roller shutter manufacturers, Griesser AG, Switzerland, presented a report on the five-year development of the new coil coating plant and the advantages that Griesser has gained from the use of Openair® plasma technology. The computer-controlled plasma unit measuring only 2 m x 1.50 m now replaces at Griesser a 60 m long wet chemical cleaning line. This means that depending on the degree of soiling of the coils in the Griesser works large volumes of chemicals and thousands of metric tons of liquid waste have been avoided since deployment of the new system.
With a report bearing the title “Corrosion protection of aluminium by means atmospheric-pressure plasma coatings” Dr. Alexander Knospe, head of the “Research & Development” department at Plasmatreat, Steinhagen, introduced the series of papers on the second principal topic of the day. Dr. Alfred Baalmann, Plasma Technology Group leader at the Fraunhofer IFAM, Bremen, pursued this topic with a presentation on “Innovative local corrosion protection for aluminium” which showed those present the results of the development of this novel form of corrosion protection by plasma polymerisation under atmospheric conditions. This work was carried out over several years in collaboration with Plasmatreat.
The reasons why TRW Automotive, Germany, settled exclusively on the use of Openair® / PlasmaPlus® plasma technology and ruled out all other processes were made clear by Dipl.-Ing. Bertram Schwanitz, TRW Automotive GmbH, in his lecture “Retrointegration of Openair® plasma in an existing process chain in the automotive engineering supply industry”.
Christian Buske closed the conference with a presentation on the use of Openair® plasma throughout the world in the most varied sectors of industry. A following get-together afforded guests and host the opportunity for more detailed discussions.
