What is it about?

The powder coating is an economical, technologically superior and environment friendly painting technique compared to other conventional painting methods. However large variation in coating thickness can reduce the attractiveness of powder coated products. The coating thickness variation can also adversely affect the surface appearance and corrosion resistivity of the product. This can eventually lead to customer dissatisfaction and loss of market share. In this paper, the author discusses a dual response surface optimization methodology to minimize the thickness variation around the target value of powder coated industrial enclosures. The industrial enclosures are cabinets used for mounting the electrical and electronic equipments. The proposed methodology consists of establishing the relationship between the coating thickness & the powder coating process parameters and developing models for the mean and variance of coating thickness. Then the powder coating process is optimized by minimizing the standard deviation of coating thickness subject to the constraint that the thickness mean would be very close to the target. The study resulted in achieving a coating thickness mean of 80.0199 microns for industrial enclosures, which is very close to the target value of 80 microns. A comparison of the results of the proposed approach with that of existing methodologies showed that the suggested method is equally good or even better than the existing methodologies. The result of the study is also validated with a new batch of industrial enclosures.

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Perspectives

Boby John is currently a Technical Officer at Statistical Quality Control & Operations Research (SQC & OR) Unit, Indian Statistical Institute, Bangalore. He received MSc degree in Statistics from the Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottyam, India and MTech degree in Quality, Reliability & Operations Research from Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. He is engaged in teaching & consulting in the fields of Six Sigma, Quality & Reliability Engineering, Business Analytics, Process Performance Modeling, etc. He has published seventeen papers in international journals and participated in many national and international conferences. Email: boby@isibang.ac.in.

Dr Boby John
Indian Statistical Institute

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This page is a summary of: A dual response surface optimization methodology for achieving uniform coating thickness in powder coating process, International Journal of Industrial Engineering Computations, January 2015, Growing Science,
DOI: 10.5267/j.ijiec.2015.5.004.
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