Application of a Uniform Coating Thickness for Complex or Irregular Surfaces

Current coating methodologies for geometrically irregular surfaces have become increasing complex and expensive to apply. Yet surfaces exposed to corrosive environments can still suffer the risk of corrosion. While the Navy has invested in edge retentive coating systems, application procedures still require the application of multiple coats due to the challenges inherent in coating complex and irregular surfaces. The use of multiple coating layers to ensure adequate coverage directly translates to increased labor and materials costs. And yet coating failures still tend to occur most rapidly in areas of geometric irregularity. Context Fusion is developing a novel spray coating technology for uniformly coating large complex surfaces for the naval shipbuilding industry. The system will be compact, completely self-contained and capable of retrofitting to existing spray coating equipment. The research will demonstrate that this coating technology will not only reduce the labor and material cost by substantially eliminating overspray, but the high transfer efficiency inherent with this approach will also significantly reduce the release of the coating material into the environment. BENEFITS: Context Fusion anticipates that the combination of decreased time and cost for coating application, more reliable coating coverage, and ease of adaptability to existing coating systems will create a demand initially in the Navy that will extend to other heavy marine industrial applications, e.g. offshore structures, marine commercial vessels, cruise vessels, casino vessels, etc. We also believe solving the specific challenge of the Navy coating requirement will have direct application to a number of heavy manufacturing and maintenance industries, e.g. petroleum refineries, power generation facilities, paper and pulp, etc. Further refinements on nozzle assembly design will apply to most of the thin-film industry.