PAINT & POWDER
Watch Live as you Paint !
RF Telemetry technology opens scope for live paint cure product temperature monitoring
Large OEM automotive paint lines are all closely monitored and controlled by sophisticated monitoring systems . Such systems are generally based on monitoring of control thermocouples within zones of the various ovens . Although giving 24 / 7 monitoring capability obviously such data does not give actual product temperature . For years process engineers have been striving to achieve continuous live product temperature monitoring through the process .
Radio telemetry as a technology allows in theory direct data transfer from a data logger out of an oven to a monitoring PC providing such live monitoring . Although well known the technology has rarely been applied to temperature profiling in the automotive paint market . The reasons for this are generally down to the distance over which the signal needs to be transmitted ( Oven to QA Office ), number of receivers needed to detect a signal out of the oven and the costs associated with configuring receiver units hard linked by cable and needing external power to operate . Even with expensive RF configuration any data gaps in the process , due to large ovens , faraday gage effects and transient RF interferences can make comprehensive monitoring difficult and non-conclusive .
To overcome the inherent technical limitations of existing RF Systems on the market PhoenixTM has developed its own unique RF telemetry system . The system has been designed in such a way as to overcome the inherent challenges of the automotive paint line . The two-way RF system not only monitors temperature data recorded by the data logger but allows direct control of the data logger itself . The data logger can be reset or downloaded direct from the oven without any need to access the data logger inside the thermal barrier . The RF signal transmitted out of the oven is passed along a series of repeater units back to the main coordinator connected to the monitoring PC . The repeater units are powered by battery and are not physically linked by any cable . As such they can be positioned where needed and moved with ease ( No expensive infrastructure installation costs ). For a paint line it is possible therefore that each oven has its own allocated repeater ( s ). A very valuable feature of the system is a unique ‘ catch up feature ’. Any missed data from RF black spots is automatically re-transmitted as soon as the RF signal is re-established ensuring that profile data is complete .
Combining RF telemetry with the performance of the profiling system it is possible to monitor the complete paint
Schematic of RF system configured for an automotive paint line allowing real time monitoring of all ovens in a single continuous run .
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34 FEBRUARY 2021 read online : www . surfaceworld . com