Coating and Drying Defects

Book excerpt: A practical guide for ensuring a defect-free coating and drying process For professionals in the coating and drying industry, the world is a demanding place. New, technically complex products such as fuel cell membranes, thin film batteries, solar cells, and RFID chips require coatings of extreme precision. With the bar raised so high, understanding how to troubleshoot and eliminate defects on a coating line is an essential skill for all personnel. Coating and Drying Defects, Second Edition provides manufacturing and quality control personnel, equipment operators and supervisors, and plant engineers and scientists with the full complement of proven tools and techniques for detecting, defining, and eliminating coating defects and operating problems, and for ensuring that they do not recur. Updating the valuable contents of the first edition, this practical Second Edition: Describes all major processes for coating and drying of continuous film on sheets or webs Covers technologies that have been recently developed to prevent defect formation and improve operating procedures Provides a rational framework within which to assess and analyze virtually any defect that may arise Offers step-by-step guidelines for conducting every phase of the troubleshooting process, including defect prevention Going beyond simply describing a disparate set of troubleshooting techniques, this unique guide arms readers with a systematic, nonmathematical methodology encompassing the entire coating operation, becoming an indispensable resource for manufacturing and quality-control personnel as well as plant engineers, polymer scientists, surface scientists, organic chemists, and coating scientists.