Over 50 years ago, powder coating became established as a highly automated industrial process for enhancing the surface quality of preferred metal substrates. One of the main reasons for this is the fact that the application process is very gentle on the environment because, as opposed to wet painting, solvents are not required.
With the development of tribostatic powder coating at the former Verkehrshochschule in Dresden, a major foundation stone was laid in the mid-1960s. The development of electrostatic application of powder in an electrical voltage field formed a basis to establish an environmentally friendly, highly automated coating process that allowed extremely high-quality coats of paint to be applied. The technical availability of thermoset powder coatings (two-component systems) manufactured by extrusion also played a major role in this development because it enabled suitable coating materials with a homogeneous distribution of binders, pigments and fillers to be realized in an ecologically acceptable way. In combination with high-quality binder systems, this made it possible to produce coatings with maximum corrosion protection and weathering resistance for a wide range of applications.