Paint Shop Solutions
Chemistry Solutions for the Automotive Paint Shop
During the automotive paint shop process, the vehicle is cleaned of contaminants from the body shop, degreased, pretreated for corrosion prevention, sanded, sealed, and ultimately painted. This stage of automotive manufacturing is known to consume the highest amount of energy and emits the largest amount of carbon dioxide emissions – offering opportunities for automotive sustainability advancements.
Henkel provides a wide range of industrial sealant, industrial coatings and surface treatment solutions for all your paint shop needs.
Technologies and processes that favor energy, space, material, and process efficiency are key to reducing environmental impact and conserving resources. At Henkel, we’re regularly pursuing the use of raw materials from renewable sources, such as renewable thermosets in paint shop sealants and coatings.
Additionally, our Next Generation Metal Pretreatment process, BONDERITE® Thin Film, provides effective metal pretreatment across all major metals for the vehicle body in white while eliminating the use of heavy metal phosphates, shortening the processing line, reducing water use, and operating at ambient temperature to reduce the amount of energy used.
Contact a member of our team today to find out more about our paint shop solutions.
Paint Shop Sealants & Coatings for High Performance & Comfort
Water, dirt, dust, humidity, and other environmental elements can cause extensive vehicle damage, while unnecessary noise can significantly reduce passenger comfort. Henkel’s paint shop sealants and coatings work to ensure long-term vehicle durability and protection, while enabling appearance, paintability, and evenness across internal and external welded joints.
| Protection | Visual Performance | Technical Performance |
|---|---|---|
| Dirt | Appearance | Tightness (Sealing) |
| Dust | Paintability | Durability |
| Humidity | Eveness | Corrosion protection |
Paint Shop Sealants
Developed traditionally with PVC plastisol chemistry - and available using renewable thermoset technology - Henkel’s paint shop sealants bond securely to electrodeposition coatings, provide high flexibility even at very low temperatures, and deliver good peel resistance. The sealants convert to a solid, flexible film when passing through the paint oven. Typically applied via flatstream spray, our paint shop sealants enable weight savings of up to 2.5 kilograms per vehicle through density reduction.
Extruded paint shop sealant tapes are also available with variable flow rates and magnetic application for vertical or angled positioning.
Paint Shop Coatings
Today’s vehicles face tough environmental conditions. Road salt, moisture, road debris, and more can damage and corrode vehicle underbodies. Henkel’s underbody coatings virtually eliminate corrosion and offer significant protection from abrasions and chips. Robotically applied by airless spray at pressures of 180 to 220 bar, underbody coatings play an important role in full vehicle protection.
TEROSON® Liquid Applied Sound Deadeners (LASD), on the other hand, focus on reducing noise, vibration & harshness in key areas, while enabling weight reduction. Learn more about our LASD solutions here.
Application of Henkel’s Liquid Applied Sound Deadeners in the floor pan. Also applied on doors and roofs.
Next Generation Metal Pretreatment for Multi-Metal Corrosion Protection
Metal pretreatment plays an essential role in ensuring robust paint adhesion and corrosion prevention for cars.
For decades, Henkel’s BONDERITE® Zinc Phosphate process has been the go-to metal pretreatment process for traditional steel bodies. However, as the use of aluminum for the body-in-white has expanded, so have the options for metal pretreatment.
Today, Henkel offers diverse metal pretreatment processes to support a variety of vehicle body needs that accommodate increasing amounts of aluminum while continuing to achieve performance standards across all common substrates.
BONDERITE® Thin Film coatings are approximately 100 times thinner than zinc phosphate coatings and have a significantly reduced coating weight. This helps to reduce material cost, while placing an increased importance on effective cleaning since thin coatings are less forgiving to cleaning imperfections.
The environmental and cost benefits of the BONDERITE® Thin Film process are significant and add up to a 20-40 percent annual cost savings when taking energy savings, sludge reduction, water savings, and maintenance reduction into account.
The BONDERITE® Thin Film process will continue to evolve in the future. In the near-term, Henkel is working toward the use of iron deposition for improved performance on individual substrates.
Long-term, Henkel is studying ways to leverage benefits between coating technologies for further refinement and additional environmental optimization.
