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LED technology offers many opportunities

Reduce your energy costs in industrial coating now!

LED technology has been known for many years as an energy-saving technology; including for hardening UV lacquers. But it hasn’t yet become established in the furniture and timber industry: there are only a few manufacturers in Europe who fully rely on this technology.

The current explosion in energy prices makes it even more worthwhile to add this topic back onto the agenda.

What are the benefits of LED lamps?

Many hardening processes can already be performed using LED lamps. This applies both to pigmented and clear lacquers. But there is one restriction: conventional lamps are still needed in the final coating area. Depending on the system configuration, a number of UV lamps could be replaced by modern LED lamps, such as for hardening basecoats or for gelling. It’s also often possible to replace combinations of several lamps with just one LED lamp. Other properties worth mentioning include:

  •  Feed rates of up to 50m/min can be realised.
  •  No use of heavy metals in the lamps
  •  Future-proof given the impending ban relating to mercury in lamps
  •  Short switch-on and switch-off times, no cooling down or slow start-up of the lamps
  •  This allows lamps to be switched off during short or clocked process pauses
  •  Less distance to the workpiece (10 - 70mm) than with traditional lamps
  •  Very low heat generation, resulting in longer service life of sanding belts
  •  4 times longer lamp life

How much energy can be saved?

As always, it depends on the circumstances on site. Savings of 60 - 75 % can generally be expected. But the savings potential quickly becomes clear if you merely consider the energy input of an LED (around 6 kW) compared with that of a mercury lamp (around 18 kW). And these savings are even larger when an LED lamp replaces the combination of a gallium and a mercury lamp (together around 36kW).

But beware, since there are different types of LED lamp on the market: manufacturer details suggest that these savings are achieved using air-cooled LED lamps. A lot of energy is conversely required for water cooling in water-cooled systems, which significantly reduces the savings.

Another point that is often forgotten when calculating the savings: LED lamps don't produce any harmful ozone, so they don’t require an extraction system. This saves considerable heating costs in your production hall during winter. Assuming a loss of around 1000m³/h of warm air per lamp when using several conventional extraction lamps adds up to considerable savings in heating costs.

Who could benefit from investing in LED radiation?

It can be said that the purchase generally pays for itself after a few years. The investment can even be worthwhile after a few months given around the clock production. In the case of single-shift operation, machine manufacturers reckon with a payback period of 4-5 years, which of course largely depends on the prevailing energy prices. Switching may not be worthwhile if systems are only operated sporadically. The following diagrams show the dependencies based on examples:

Which lacquers are being used?

Many of our Hesse-Lignal lacquer formulations already work using LED technology, including our UV lacquers for roller coating and our HYDRO-UV products.

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