company news about Say Goodbye to the Era of "Giant Ovens": How UV Powder Coatings Achieve "Second-Level Curing"

In today's industrial coating field, traditional powder coatings are highly favored for their "zero VOC" environmental protection characteristics. However, their capital-intensive thermosetting process—especially the huge, energy-intensive curing tunnel that takes ten to twenty minutes—has always been a fatal weakness in production efficiency and cost control.

Traditional thermosetting powder coatings are like "slow-cooking soup," while UV powder coatings are like "instant stir-frying." What kind of potential does its core advantage—"instant curing"—bring to the industry?

Traditional thermosetting powder coatings involve melting, leveling, and chemical cross-linking (curing) all in one process, relying entirely on a high-temperature oven at 160°C to 200°C, where the "heating" process alone takes 15-20 minutes. UV powder coatings, however, cleverly divide the curing process into two steps:

After the powder is electrostatically sprayed onto the workpiece, it first enters an infrared (IR) or hot air heating zone. Note that the sole purpose of this step is to melt and level the powder into a smooth liquid (or semi-solid) film. This process requires significantly less time and temperature than traditional curing (e.g., approximately 90°C-120°C for tens of seconds to minutes).

As the molten coating leaves the heating zone, it immediately enters a UV-LED or high-pressure mercury lamp irradiation zone. The photoinitiator "latent" in the coating formulation is activated, instantly triggering a polymerization reaction within 1 to 5 seconds, transforming the coating from a liquid to a hard solid. This is the key to "instant curing": it separates the "melting" and "curing" processes. Heat is only responsible for leveling; light is responsible for curing.

This is the most obvious change. Time comparison: Traditional curing oven (15-20 minutes) vs. UV curing (a few seconds). Result: Production line conveyor belt speed can be increased several times. Curing ovens that previously required a large floor area (tens of meters long) can now be compressed into UV irradiation chambers only a few meters long. For factories where space is at a premium, a smaller footprint and higher production line speed mean an exponential increase in "output per unit area." Your factory can complete more orders in less time and with less space.

Traditional curing ovens are "energy-consuming behemoths" in the workshop (commonly known as "electricity guzzlers" or "gas guzzlers"). To maintain a high temperature of nearly 200°C, they require a continuous consumption of large amounts of electricity or natural gas, and preheating and start-up also take a long time.

While thermosetting powder coatings are still struggling to balance "temperature" and "time," UV powder coatings have already restructured the process by introducing "light." Therefore, "instant curing" may be the technological innovation that the coating industry needs most under the dual pressures of "high efficiency" and "environmental protection."