“Changing our painting process was the only way to continue the production at this site,” says Raphaël Alain, the Operations Director. Indeed, until end of 2015 the company was still operating a conventional dip paint primer process that still contained some solvents. This process had major health and safety disadvantages. With increasingly tight environmental legislation, solvents had to be eliminated and replaced by a sustainable water-based process.
Henkel was the right partner to address this problem and proposed its innovative BONDERITE® M-PP process (then known as Autophoretic coatings). Radiateurs Industrie was immediately convinced by this simple and robust technology that could solve all their environmental headaches while greatly improving the cosmetics and corrosion resistance performance of their steel radiators.
The new paint process had to be 100% solvent-free, it had to meet all the performance requirements of Radiateurs Industrie, and it also had to be compact enough to fit into the new extension to the factory. Additionally, the primer coating had to be compatible with powder top-coating, and if possible had to have an even thickness over the entire radiator surface, even on the difficult-to-reach internal convector plates. It had to be invisible, or in other words clear, and finally, its total cost in use had to be competitive.
“All these requirements were challenging enough on their own. Meeting all of them combined required exceptional focus and perseverance,” says Mathieu Van De Cappelle, Technical Customer Service specialist at Henkel. “We had to be particularly creative in order to meet tough cost targets and we designed-to-cost everything from our formulation to our supply chain. All in all, driving such an innovative project and making it a success has been a great achievement for the entire team,” comments Loïc Guillou, Sales Engineer at Henkel. Unique features of the BONDERITE® M-PP technology include its ability to uniformly coat complex ferrous metal parts, also inside tubes and on sharp edges; its chemical composition that is entirely free of solvents and volatile organic compounds; its compact process sequence; and its low environmental impact with very little energy consumption and minimal waste water stream. The new installation started up smoothly on January 4, 2016.
Process sequence:
- Alkaline degreasing
- Alkaline degreasing
- Tap water rinse
- Tap water rinse
- RO water rinse
- BONDERITE® M-PP 102
- 90°C stove
