Fighting impact fusion -- a producer's take
When searching impact fusion on the Internet recently, we found hundreds of references and questions on the topic of impact fusion. That means that impact fusion is a real problem facing powder coaters, the powder coatings producers, as well as the application equipment manufacturers. Although this article doesn’t claim to be an exhaustive study on the subject, we discuss factors that we have found, in our experience, to be particularly important. We discuss what conditions are likely to cause impact fusion and what powder coatings producers and applicators can do to prevent it.
The following definition of impact fusion is found on the Internet: Friction may cause powder particles to fuse along the walls of the powder hose and other components in the powder delivery path. Impact fusion is the combining of these powder particles to form a solid mass during the delivery and application process. An example of impact fusion on application equipment can be seen in Figure 1.