Gemata designs the green future of spray finishing

The company has further improved the environmental performance of its spray systems

Gemata company always searches for news solutions for the tanning sector and, moreover, designs helpful technologies for saving economic and environmental resources.

In recent times, studies from the R&D department focused on the most problems concerning the traditional finishing with spray booth: thanks to these analyses, the environmental performances of the Gemata spraying systems has been significantly improved with the innovations made to both the economizer and the scrubber.

In recent years Gemata has redesigned the SPRAYSTAR-EVO spray booths, characterizing them with a particular octagonal shape that avoids the stagnation of fumes and allows a 10% reduction in the volume of air to be extracted compared to the traditional rectangular shape. These advanced cabins make use of special green solutions such as: – the device for the deionization of the atomized air of the spray guns to increase of a 30-40 % the deposit of paint on the leather; – the Heat Recovery system uses the humid and hot air suctioned from the drying tunnel to pre-heat the dry air coming from outside, thus reducing running costs; – the Energy Saving system to optimse energy consumption by means of a completely automatized electronic control that progressively stops the spray line up to its complete turn off in case of lack of leathers to be processed.

In addition to these innovations, Gemata technicians worked to the develop a new economiser that introduces a different and greener approach to reduce and supervise the overspray. They focused on the effect on the plume on the leather evaluating the percentage of the area sprayed by the gun that overlaps: with this system the activation of the gun is such as to obtain an effective percentage of leather coverage equal to the set threshold. Summarising, while considering the shape and dynamics of the plume, precision, quality and product savings can be increased. The threshold manages with the same logic for any edge, shape or profile of the leather, regardless of its size, as well as on close fitting leathers or with the presence of holes: it is evident that the higher quality on the edges will require more overspray. Despite of this, thanks to the new economiser, it is possible to have a real-time estimate of this waste: if this quantity is judged excessive, the overlap threshold can be altered, and the effect directly verified. Finally, as previously mentioned, Gemata has paid attention to the air depuration systems with a redesign of the scrubber to minimise the pollution in atmosphere.

The new ECO-SCRUBBER provides a fume scrubbing unit with a water mist system (“wet system”) and mechanical/textile filters that improve abatement performance. It differs from the previous models for greater efficiency which is guaranteed by the particular engineering solution adopted, which includes: – a second chamber of spheres with an increased sticking surgace; – a group of nozzles placed upstream above the spheres; – an easy-to-replace dry filter group to capture solid microparticles. In this way the air comes out purified and fine dust, since all pollutants are captured. All these new technologies developed by Gemata have as their common denominator the goal of making spray finishing an ecological, efficient alternative with a lower environmental impact, to make tanning processing processes more and more sustainable.