With Fastrip and Fastrip MT, ALIT brings innovation in inline paint stripping of hooks and the recovery of aluminium profiles.
The Fastrip system
A hook in a modern painting plant, after several passes in the paint booth, can reach thicknesses of polymerised paint
of 100 – 120 micron. These thicknesses prevent the necessary conductivity for electrostatic application, resulting in
the negative effects of oversprayand an incorrect application of the powder on the product, which can amplify the
“orange peel” effect of the film.
The Fastrip system consists of a tank containing the stripping product positioned between the unloading and loading area of the plant. Just by extending a section of the pre-existing conveyor, the hook, in its travel from the unloading station towards the loading station and without being released from the chain, can be submerged into the tank (sized so that it maintains contact with the stripping solution) for approximately three minutes.
While the hook slides through the solution, the paint is stripped. At the end of the process, the conveyor repositions
the hook in the correct loading area, where the profiles are ready to be painted. This stripping system avoids the
continuous removal of the hooks and, as a result, loss of time by operators and allows for a reduction of powder
coatings consumption.
To allow the operators to have a very simple process to manage without downtime for cleaning the tank, the
system is fitted with a system for the filtration of paint sludge deposited on the bottom.
The Fastrip MT system
Besides hook cleaning, recovering profiles with painting defects is very important. Normally, the profiles to be recovered were sent to outside companies specialised in paint stripping, but during the economic downturn, many companies tried to set up in-house processes to perform this step. Based on ALIT’s experience with stripping paint from hooks, the company developed stripping systems for other processes. This is where the idea came up to offer a solution for stripping paint from aluminium profiles, which ALIT named Fastrip MT (Multi Tank).
The conceptconsists of designing a modular plant including different tanks served by an automated overhead crane.
“Stripping the aluminium profile in the most complete version of the systems requires a stripping tank, a heated tank with automatic cover, a second tank for rinsing, a third tank for alkaline pickling at a temperature of 30- 40 C°, a fourth
tank for rinsing, a fifth for neutralization and a sixth for rinsing. Tanks are designed to allow the paint sludge to be conveyed to the filtration system fitted with a filter press and decanting vat. The filtered solution is then sent to the
stripping tanks. This is the ideal configuration of the Fastrip MT plant; however, options exist to reduce the number of steps by installing first a stripping tank followed by a rinsing tank. This enables companies to reduce their initial investment while maintaining the possibility to expand the stages of the process later, using the same platform and inserting the overhead crane and the filtration system to obtain savings in the stripping product and management costs”, explains ALIT’s CEO Loris Rossi to ipcm® International Paint&Coating Magazine.
Fastrip MT has been designed to solve the problems of aesthetic finishing that arise during the final stage in the process of painting aluminium profiles; it avoids having to scrap material that has been painted badly, having to sand it down or wasting precious time by having outside companies perform chemical stripping.
Read below the full article published on the international surface treatment magazine ipcm® International Paint&Coating Magazine, issue n. 47 (September/October 2017):