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Against the backdrop of tightening environmental policies and the promotion of the "dual-carbon" strategy, powder coatings, with their advantages of zero VOC emissions, high resource utilization, and excellent coating performance, have become a core direction for the transformation and upgrading of the coating industry. The "paint-to-powder" trend continues to deepen in fields such as construction machinery, wooden furniture, and automobile manufacturing, placing higher demands on the application scenarios of powder coatings. Low-temperature curing and rapid curing technologies, as key to breaking through the application limitations of traditional powder coatings, not only broaden the range of substrate compatibility but also reduce energy consumption and production costs, becoming a core focus of technological innovation in the industry.
With the penetration of "paint-to-powder" into emerging fields, the market demand for low-temperature curing powder coatings is becoming increasingly urgent. In the construction machinery field, the coating of large structural components has low temperature sensitivity, but emerging substrates such as wooden furniture, engineering plastics, and carbon fiber, due to their limited heat resistance, cannot withstand the high-temperature curing process of traditional powder coatings. In the automotive industry, some plastic parts and lightweight materials also have specific requirements for low-temperature curing, generally requiring the curing temperature to be controlled below 140℃.
Traditional powder coatings mostly use high-curing-temperature resins, with curing temperatures generally above 180℃. This limits their application to high-temperature resistant substrates such as metals and necessitates specialized high-temperature curing equipment, significantly restricting their application scenarios. Lowering the curing temperature is key to overcoming this bottleneck, enabling powder coatings to be used on heat-sensitive substrates while reducing equipment investment and energy consumption, thus promoting the penetration of powder coatings into more fields.
Currently, the industry mainly achieves low-temperature curing of powder coatings through two approaches, balancing technical feasibility and industrialization:
Development of New Low-Temperature Curing Resins:** The focus is on developing specialized resins such as unsaturated polyester, unsaturated acrylic, and polyurethane acrylic resins. These resins have more targeted molecular structure designs, optimizing functional group density and reactivity to lower the required curing temperature while ensuring core properties such as coating adhesion, hardness, and corrosion resistance. For example, polyurethane acrylic resins, with their excellent low-temperature reactivity and flexibility, have already been preliminarily applied in the coating of wooden furniture and plastic substrates.
Coating Process Innovation: Utilizing infrared curing technology (including near-infrared and mid-far-infrared), specific wavelength infrared radiation simultaneously heats the coating and substrate, avoiding uneven heating of the substrate caused by traditional hot air baking, significantly reducing curing temperature and time. UV (ultraviolet) and electron beam radiation curing technologies trigger resin cross-linking reactions through radiation energy, achieving rapid curing without a high-temperature environment, especially suitable for ultra-thin coatings and heat-sensitive substrates, further expanding the application scenarios of low-temperature curing.
Reduced Energy Consumption and Environmental Costs: Low-temperature curing significantly reduces energy consumption in the baking process, lowering the carbon footprint of production, aligning with the national "dual-carbon" strategy requirements, while simultaneously reducing enterprise energy expenditures and enhancing cost competitiveness.
Expanded Substrate Application Range: Breaking through the limitations of metal substrates, it enables powder coating of heat-sensitive materials such as wood, engineering plastics, and carbon fiber, providing environmentally friendly coating solutions for industries such as furniture, electronics, and new energy, broadening the market boundaries of powder coatings.
Optimizing Curing Effects for Large Workpieces: Engineering machinery components and large structural parts, due to their thickness and slow heat transfer, often suffer from surface over-curing and internal uncuring with traditional high-temperature curing. Low-temperature curing avoids excessive heat accumulation, improving curing uniformity and coating quality stability.
Traditional powder coating curing processes are demanding, generally requiring baking at 180-200℃ for 10-20 minutes. This lengthy curing cycle is unsuitable for high-efficiency production demands. With the large-scale application of powder coatings in heavy machinery, automotive manufacturing, and coil coating, companies are increasingly demanding higher production efficiency, leading to the emergence of rapid-curing powder coatings. Currently, the mainstream rapid-curing standard in the industry is 1-5 minutes of curing at 210-230℃, significantly shortening the production cycle and providing a solution for high-volume coating scenarios.
In mass production fields such as automotive parts and coil coatings, rapid-curing technology enables continuous and high-speed coating, reducing production line footprint and equipment investment, becoming key to improving enterprise capacity and market competitiveness.
Breakthroughs in rapid curing technology mainly rely on material innovation and process optimization, with these two paths advancing synergistically:
Synthesis of Highly Reactive Resin: Rapid cross-linking reactions are achieved by increasing the density of resin functional groups and adding highly efficient catalysts. The core technology lies in balancing reactivity and storage stability, ensuring that powder coatings do not prematurely cure during production, storage, and application while increasing curing speed. The industry is screening new metal salt catalysts and organic amine catalysts to increase activity while reducing catalyst dosage, ensuring stable coating performance.
Application of Infrared Curing Technology: Utilizing the high-intensity radiation energy of near-infrared and mid-far-infrared rays, rapid penetration of the coating allows for simultaneous heating of the coating film and substrate. Compared to traditional hot air baking, the heating rate is increased by 3-5 times, significantly shortening curing time. This technology also offers energy-saving advantages, as the radiation energy can be precisely applied to the coating, reducing environmental heat loss and further reducing production costs.
Improved Production Efficiency:** Significantly shortening baking time enables rapid or even high-speed coating, especially suitable for large-scale batch production scenarios such as automotive parts and coil coatings, helping companies improve capacity and production line utilization.
Reduced Overall Costs: Shortening the production cycle reduces energy consumption and equipment operating costs. Combined with automated coating production lines, this can further reduce labor costs and improve corporate profitability.
In recent years, with the iterative upgrades in material research and coating equipment processes, low-temperature/rapid curing technology for powder coatings has made significant progress. In terms of functionality, low-temperature curing powder coatings have achieved stable coating on wood, plastic, and other substrates. Rapid curing products are increasingly widely used in the automotive and construction machinery sectors, and core indicators such as coating adhesion, weather resistance, and corrosion resistance have met industry standards.
However, there is still room for improvement. In terms of decorative properties, low-temperature/rapid curing processes are prone to problems such as poor leveling and uneven gloss, making it difficult to meet the stringent requirements for coating texture in high-end furniture and automotive exterior parts. Further optimization of resin formulations and curing process parameters is needed.
In the future, with the deepening implementation of the national "dual-carbon" strategy, environmental protection and energy conservation will become the core guiding principles for the coating industry. Low-temperature/rapid curing technology will become an important growth point for the powder coating industry, driving the "paint-to-powder" transition to more emerging fields. Low-temperature/rapid-curing powder coatings are expected to experience explosive growth in sectors such as wooden furniture, new energy vehicle components, and electronic device housings.
Low-temperature curing and rapid-curing technologies are core directions for the powder coating industry to overcome application limitations and achieve high-quality development. Through material innovation and process optimization, they have solved the constraints of traditional powder coatings on substrates and production efficiency, while also aligning with the industry's trend towards environmental protection and energy conservation. Currently, both technologies have been industrialized in multiple fields, and their functionality is gradually improving; however, enhancing decorative properties remains a key challenge for the industry. In the future, with collaborative innovation across the industry chain, technological breakthroughs in resin formulations, catalysts, and coating equipment will drive the continuous maturation of low-temperature/rapid-curing technologies, opening up broader market opportunities for the powder coating industry and contributing to the achievement of "dual-carbon" goals and sustainable industry development.
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