Cost savings with oven temperature profiling
By understanding and controlling your thermal cure process, you can improve operating efficiency and maximize your company’s profitability. This article discusses how oven temperature profilers helped two companies improve their finishing output. It includes graphs and charts on how this was done, and discusses four key areas in your curing system where oven temperature profiling can help cut costs.
The majority of today’s oven temperature profiling systems (see example Figure 1) are used to simply check that the coated product reaches and maintains the specified temperature for the correct time (dwell time), ensuring the coating is thermally cured. This is an essential step to improving operating profit by simply reducing the risk of rejects or the need for costly rework. Not getting the cure schedule right could significantly increase the true costs to your company and affect your whole operation: labor, energy, coatings, and lost business (Figure 2). Guaranteeing cure quality is the mere tip of the iceberg in terms of how profiling can help you achieve the full potential of your coating operation.