Automotive painting process: Minimizing energy consumption by using adjusted convective heat transfer coefficients

Abstract

The process of drying/curing automobile painting is characterized as one of the main stages in automobile assembly. To guarantee the final painting quality, optimal operating conditions (mainly the temperature profile in the painting chamber) must be satisfied, and they are empirically defined in most cases. The availability of a mathematical model in transient regime enables the prediction of the drying/curing process behavior and consequences of possible operational changes on the final quality of the paint. However, obstacles continue to exist with respect to the implementation of the aforementioned types of models given the large number of parameters and complexity involved in their determination among which convection heat transfer coefficients are notable. Thus, the study presents a methodology to adjust the mathematical model of a paint-curing oven via determining convection heat transfer coefficients based on industrial data. The adjusted model was used to predict new operational scenarios for the most commonly used oven in automobile painting processes, namely the Elpo oven. The results indicate that the proposed methodology can be applied as a tool to develop operational optimization strategies that result in decreasing rework and energy costs without compromising painting quality.