How To Achieve Process Control With Prodigy™

By exploiting Prodigy™ technology a powder coating user can not only gain Process Control, but can also begin to execute Process Improvement through increased transfer efficiency.

On any powder-coated product, the quality of the finish is only as good as the minimum film weight. The thinnest acceptable point is also your maximum film thickness as anything else can be considered ‘wasted’ or unnecessary powder.

Fig. 1 depicts a powder coating line running without Prodigy™ technology, showing the film thickness across the product. Point 1 is the current film thickness that indicates the quality characteristic of the finished product and the minimum required film weight.

Fig 1

Fig. 2 depicts a powder coating line running with Prodigy™ technology in red, compared with the traditional powder coating line as shown in Fig 1. A more even distribution of powder is obtained thanks to the closed loop and constant pump output, coupled with the advanced triggering and recipe driven coating conditions.

Fig 2

Now that Prodigy™ technology has achieved process control, we can make improvements to bring the average film thickness down by using the iControl™ percent adjust functionality, or turning one gun output down, then simply copy and pasting it to all other guns. The result is that powder savings can be made as shown in Fig.3

Fig 3