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Thermo-smoothing of wood and wood materials - recent results

Fuchs, Ingrid / Pflüger, Thorsten

Thermosmoothing is a new finishing technology for wood materials, especially MDF. The furniture industry used the thermosmoothing with electrical heated tools. Producers of powdercoated and lacquered furniture have several advantages from the thermo smoothing procedure. Last time was tested the thermosmoothing of wood and there were some very good results. The thermo smoothed surfaces of different types of wood had a high smoothness and give a good basic of coating processes. The advantages of thermo smoothing by coating processes demonstrated extensive investigations. Thermo smoothed, sanded and brushed MDF surfaces were coated with powder. Various surface designs were chosen as model samples of real furniture elements. The effect of different preprocessing techniques were studied to obtain coatable surfaces. The model samples were produced in the IHD and the surface-properties of the model samples were tested there. The powder coating was carried out by an industrial equipment, which was suitable for Lowbake- and UV-powder. After its there were some tests to characterise the surface of the coated model samples, such as roughness, thickness of the layer, adhesion of the layer and chemical resistance. In addition there were some climate tests to investigate the danger to open cracks. It was found that the quality of pre-processed surfaces is a very important precondition on the final coating quality. Powder coating requires a flat surface with a homogeneous, high density. Therefore, special attention had to be paid to edges and inner profiles of furniture elements due to their lower density compared to the main surface. The results of the industrial powder coating experiments demonstrated the strong influence of the pre-processing technique onto the coating quality. It is shown that thermo-smoothing is the best pre-processing procedure for powder coating of MDF.