Producers of aerosol paints typically deal with color palettes in the thousands. They support almost all the automotive and industrial colors which have been produced. The batch sizes can be a 4 pack of aerosol cans to a large run of a thousand cans of a color. The colors are formulated, agitated, filtered and then a special machine loads the batch into the aerosol cans.

Engineering Discovery at customer site:

Price point of automated system of concern. System must be Class 1 / Division 1 compatible for installation due to this being solvent borne materials.
Must be highly accurate and repeatable. Some small batch mixes have colorants which are highly concentrated (hyper-toners) and are in amounts as low as 0.1 grams in the formula.
Special modifications to formula editor interface required for this user. Specially designed for aerosol formulation and batching.
Most of each formula batch consists of a “base” which is either white or a clear and is approximately 80% or more of the volume, with up to 14 colorants are available to add to the base to produce the final color formula.
It was found thru investigation, that 6 of the colorants had extremely low usage. Therefore the ideal size for an automated system would be 10 ingredients (2 bases + 8 colorants). The low-runner colorants could be added by hand when needed. The automated system must support “hand adds”.

Our Solution: GRAVIMETRIX Mini

The GRAVIMETRIX Mini system was comprised of a 10 Nozzle Dispense station positioned above a high resolution scale. A purged control enclosure houses the controller, operator interface, and intrinsically-safe mouse and keyboard. The colorants are supplied via Stainless steel pressure tanks with agitators (smooth pulseless flow) while the bases are supplied by drums fitted with pneumatic pumps and agitators.

Benefits:

Accurate, repeatable first time formulation without the need to “tweak” the color.
Full Reporting system for all Dispenser functions in a SQL Server database.
Simple installation. Requires 110 vac (5 amps) and compressed air.
Supply rack with grounding and lid holders for the SS Pressure Tank colorant supplies.
Few moving or exotic parts, easy maintenance.
All wet surfaces of Stainless Steel construction.
Met customer’s price point expectation.