Delivering modern coatings on robotic production lines is a challenging job. To protect vehicles' body panels it is absolutely essential that the paint or other liquid substance is at the correct temperature to start its thermal curing process. Prior to being atomized through a spray nozzle, the media must therefore be held at a critical temperature at pressures up to 3000 PSI.

The Media Heater tasked ARCOL with fulfilling this complex brief for the installation of a media heater in Sweden. The heater has to give the correct input profile in order that there are no ‘cool spots' that would fail to activate the materials.

ARCOL selected the FPA 100 resistor for mounting on the multi hollow copper heating block. This was chosen for its very fast thermal time constant: heat generated in the thick film element is quickly conducted to the media flowing through the block. Initial tests pushed the resistor to its 200 W rated power capacity. The final design has six devices mounted on the heater body, and these are capable of inputting more than 600 W of continuous heating.