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Varnishing plastics without orange skin

April 16, 2002

In industry plastic parts are mostly coated electrostatically. The ESTA process involves three stages of pre-treatment. A plasma based one produces conductive polymer coatings in a single-stage, thus reducing costs by about one third. It is being presented at the Hanover Fair.
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Nowadays, plastic automobile parts such as bumpers and mirror casings are very often coated using the ESTA process: Electrostatically charged droplets of paint are sprayed at the grounded workpiece, and adhere precisely to the target. The economic advantage is obvious: less wastage of paint. But in many cases, the parts are made of electrically insulating plastics, which need to undergo three stages of pre-treatment: The cleaned surface is first roughened and activated, for instance in an electrical plasma. Then an electrically conducting primer coat is sprayed on and dried. Only then can the main coat be applied electrostatically. Each of these stages is a cost factor. Companies in the paint and coatings industry are trying to reduce these costs by means of improved and less complex methods. One such solution is the single-stage process that has been developed by scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Applied Materials Research IFAM. They will be presenting it to trade visitors at the Hanover Fair (Hall 27, Stand D 02).

”Our new plasma polymerization process allows savings of up to 37 percent in the costs of pre-treatment,“ remarks project leader Dr. Lars Höper. ”The ingenious part of our process is to create an electrically conducting polymer layer directly on the surface of the workpiece.“ This is not entirely new - it is already done using wet electrochemical processes. But these require that the plastic part already has a certain minimum electrical conductivity. There is no such restriction with the IFAM process: It even coats parts made of highly insulating plastics like polyethylene. And this is how it works: A cold electric plasma at a temperature of maximum 80 °C is used to activate an injected chemical compound. Its fragments polymerize on the surface of the part, forming a layer of the desired electrically conductive polymer.

”Of course, we must convince potential users that the quality of these layers - and even more so the subsequent coatings - correspond to their requirements,“ as Höper has learnt from the project’s industrial partners. ”One of the drawbacks of such plasma coatings is that they tend to age in contact with air, and gradually lose their conductivity. In that respect, the results of the new coating technique hardly differ from those produced by conventional methods.“ Further tests have demonstrated that glossy paint coatings in any color can be applied to the preliminary layer. Indeed, plasma polymers are frequently superior in that they are less likely to contribute to a wrinkling effect similar to orange skin, so dreaded by specialists in the coatings field.

Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft

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