Companies in all industry sectors are currently being confronted with a wide variety of trends and changes. Amongst others these include new manufacturing technologies, the use of new and modified materials and material combinations, the realignment of entire industry sectors, shortened product lifecycles and smaller lot quantities, personalisation of products, regulatory changes, the digital transformation and more rigorous goals with regard to energy efficiency and climate protection. Industrial coating technology is being impacted by this as well.

High Levels of Complexity Necessitate Comprehensive Information

Although some of the issues are by no means new, the competitiveness of coating operations will increasingly depend on how well and quickly they can respond to these changes. As a prerequisite, the coating process has to be adapted or optimised. The great complexity of painting and coating processes with numerous interlinking work steps makes comprehensive information concerning trends, technologies, new developments and the suppliers throughout the entire process sequence indispensable. PaintExpo will present a corresponding cross-technology, cross-industry overview with more comprehensive and up-to-date offerings than anywhere else in the world at the Karlsruhe Exhibition Centre from the 21^st through the 24^th of April, 2020.

On the one hand, a glance at the list of exhibitors demonstrates that PaintExpo lives up to this claim. By the end of August 2019, more than 450 companies from 22 countries – including all of the market and technology leaders – had already made firm bookings for their booth locations at the world’s leading trade fair for industrial coating technologies. They’ve already reserved 98% of the exhibition floor space occupied at the event in 2018. On the other hand, it illustrates the extent of the exhibition offerings: the portfolio covers all process sequences for powder coating, liquid and UV painting and coil coating technologies. The spectrum of materials to be coated ranges from metals, plastics, wood, wooden materials, glass and ceramics, right on up to material combinations. “This targeted concentration of suppliers and technologies makes it possible for job-shop coaters and visitors from companies with in-house painting operations to inform themselves efficiently and in a targeted fashion about solutions to their own individual tasks, and to arrive at appropriate investment decisions,” reports Jürgen Haußmann, Managing Director of FairFair GmbH and promoter of PaintExpo.

From Pre-Treatment to Quality Control

Exhibitors will present future-oriented solutions for meeting the increasing demands now being placed on quality, flexibility and productivity, as well as material, energy and cost-efficiency. For example, these include new and further developments for classic wet chemical pre-treatment, as well as alternative processes. New and optimised solutions, including the simulation of painting and coating processes, provide for improved energy and material-efficiency in the fields of equipment and application technology. Attention is also being focused on increasing flexibility and productivity in this regard. Improved energy-efficiency is also the primary focus of solutions for conventional circulating-air drying, as well as alternative methods such as IR, condensation and UV drying. Robot painting is playing an increasingly important role for mid-sized and small painting operations in order to ensure reproducibly high quality. New automation concepts make it possible for these companies to get started with flexible, cost-effective solutions. However, exhibitors at the upcoming PaintExpo will not only present innovative developments for process optimisation in the fields of systems, applications and conveyor technology, drying and cross-linking, paints, automation and digitalisation, as well as quality control. For example, innovations which permit increased efficiency and process reliability will also be presented in the fields of compressed air supply, hangers and masking solutions, as well as packaging. “The comprehensive spectrum of new and improved products, technologies and processes provides visitors with a wide variety of impulses and approaches for designing or adapting their processes to meet future requirements,” concludes Jürgen Haußmann.

Further information, the entire exhibition portfolio and a preliminary exhibitor list can be accessed at www.paintexpo.com.