Non-contact Paint Thickness Gauges

Modern coil coating lines produce a wide variety of products for white goods, building products, electrical transformers and other consumer and industrial applications. Optimizing yield requires not just changing paint and coating rolls, but efficiently controlling the coating to the target thickness value for the end use. Thermo Scientific™ RM 300 EL and PROSIS™ coating weight paint thickness gauges provide online measurement of primer and finish coatings to help minimize the time required to bring the coater settings to target.

When you need to guarantee uniform coating quality, save paint, shorten start up time, and reduce waste, Thermo Scientific™ paint thickness gauges are the perfect choice. These paint thickness gauges offer fast, accurate and reliable profile measurement of paint and organic coatings providing essential information to optimize the production process.

Thermo Scientific coating weight gauges can be installed on nearly every type of coil coating process line. A variety of sensor designs have been developed to provide the best performance for specific applications.

When fast process feedback is needed, the RM 300 EL Coating Weight Gauge is available with an explosion proof sensor design capable of providing a wet measurement directly in the paint room. The PROSIS Coating Weight Sensor is especially suited for thin and ultra-thin coatings and for selective measurement of multilayer coatings. Thermo Fisher has decades of experience in coating measurement to provide the optimum and most affordable measurement solution for each coil coating process.

The RM 300 EL uses beta-backscattering measuring heads to determine the coating weight of the material by monitoring changes in the intensity of the backscattered radiation.

Beta-backscattering is a well proven and precise method for the coating weight measurement of primer and/or finish paint. Usually one measuring unit will be installed for the base material (reference) measurement of the top and/or bottom side of the strip. This reference measurement compensates the influence caused by variations of a pre-coating and/or by alloy changes of the base material.

Wet gauges measure the wet paint or wet primer for the top side of the strip behind the corresponding coaters. The line operator can immediately effect a change to the coater adjustments to bring the coating onto target.

Dry gauges for primer and finishing paint are installed after the corresponding ovens. Sensors can be positioned to measure the top or bottom side of the strip or two sensors can be used to measure both sides.

PROSIS is a highly sophisticated coating thickness sensor for thin and ultra-thin coatings on metal strip using NIR full spectrum analysis. The sensor is a true online scanning spectrometer that simultaneously captures the Near-IR spectral signature. In general, spectroscopy is a method to analyze the correlation between matter and electromagnetic waves. PROSIS uses a proprietary detector array to measure the entire near-infrared spectrum simultaneously. With this technology, the system provides a long-term stable measurement and a high signal-to-noise ratio.

The sensor analyzes infrared absorption exhibited by hydrocarbon compounds in the material to be measured. The unique detector technology analyzes the full spectrum, instead of a few pre-selected wavelengths as in conventional IR sensor designs. Full spectral analysis, coupled with an extended infrared range, allows accurate measurements of coatings that were not previously available online.