Mar 10 2005
BASF Coatings and Wessling Oberflächenveredelung GmbH (WOB) have agreed to work together in a close partnership. BASF Coatings is the system supplier for the cathodic e-coating and powder coating products used in Europe’s largest industrial coating plant, which is set to begin operation in February 2005 in Geeste, Germany. In the context of the partnership, BASF Coatings supplies binders and pigment paste to the German custom coater. These materials are then fed into the 360 cubic-meter cathodic e-coating tank. Mainly truck trailer chassis, containers, and add-on components for commercial vehicles will be coated in this newly built e-coating tank.
“Filling the e-coat tank with this large a volume of material was a real logistical challenge that our employees gladly took on,” explains Rolf Eggen of CTS Account Management within BASF Coatings’ Automotive Refinish / Commercial Transport Coatings Solutions business. All in all, the BASF Coatings employees spent two weeks on site. The services they provided included professional cleaning of the entire system, which took a week to complete. Filling also required a week’s time. Then the new e-coating tank entered a trial phase. Officially, the plant has been in operation since the end of February 2005.
In cathodic e-coating, the vehicle body literally takes a bath. The vehicle parts are provided with a so-called primer layer in the cathodic electrocoating process. The main purposes of this primer are to provide corrosion protection and to offer an outstanding surface finish for subsequent coating layers. In the cathodic e-coat bath, paint particles are deposited with the aid of electrical current on steel surfaces. The coating is then crosslinked in an oven. The entire process achieves a high degree of environmental friendliness.
Wessling Oberflächenveredelung GmbH provides up to 450 colors for the powder coating process and can coat up to 4.5 million square meters of surface area per year.
http://www.corporate.basf.com