Glass Coating
Glass substrates such as soda-lime, borosilicate, aluminosilicate and quartz glass are widely applied in architectural curtain walls, smart home appliances, automotive components and optical display industries. Surface coating constitutes a key process for performance enhancement.
What is Glass Coating Solution?
Demand for glass products has surged in energy-efficient construction, automotive glazing, interior furnishing, new energy batteries and optical display sectors in recent years. Diverse application scenarios have raised new standards for glass surface coating technologies. Modern coating processes must balance decorative performance and multifunctional capabilities, including high UV/IR shielding efficiency, optimized visible light transmittance, enhanced hydrophobicity and self-cleaning performance, as well as prolonged oxidation resistance for silver-coated glass.
Senlian specializes in automatic precision coating equipment. Leveraging extensive experience collaborating with leading glass manufacturers such as Saint-Gobain, CSG Holding, and Kibing Glass, Senlian has achieved numerous technological breakthroughs in glass coating, developing comprehensive and reliable automatic coating solutions. These solutions encompass application characteristics, process flows, advanced technologies, and modular equipment. This system helps glass manufacturers enhance their core competitiveness and expand development opportunities with lower costs, higher efficiency, and superior quality.
Glass Coating Application
What techniques are involved in Glass Coating?
Precision Roller Coating
Precision roller coating machines are the preferred coating solution for large-format flat glass, minimizing waste of expensive coatings, ensuring superior coating transfer efficiency, and reducing overall coating costs. Through careful design, they are perfectly compatible with a wide range of decorative and nano-functional coatings, delivering a uniform, high-quality coating to glass surfaces.
Curtain Coating
For wood products requiring a high-gloss finish or a one-pass thick coat, a curtain coating machine is undoubtedly an ideal choice. It can be used with UV or polyurethane paints and, through careful design, avoids the formation of wave patterns.
Precision Spray Painting
Featuring multi-axis, multi-angle spray gun movement, glass spraying technology flexibly delivers precise and uniform coating for flat, curved and irregularly shaped glass. It performs exceptionally well in applications such as preventing backside contamination of decorative glass coatings, applying micron-precision double-sided coatings to cover glass, and applying hydrophobic functional coatings to self-cleaning glass.
Drying and Cooling
Diverse glass coatings demand tailored drying technologies optimized for each coating’s curing time and temperature, with low, medium, and high temperature options available. Meanwhile, ensuring the safety of the drying process is also of paramount importance. Cooling after drying delivers uninterrupted continuous production.
Excimer Soft-Touch
As an innovative technology, it can achieve an ultra-matte, soft-touch finish (a delicate, smooth texture like a baby’s face) on glass surfaces and edges. This coating has a hardness of up to 4H, is scratch-resistant, resists fingerprints, and has self-repairing properties. It can be applied with solid-color topcoats, UV transfer printing, or digitally printed patterns.
UV Transfer Printing
For engineering projects that require creating vivid wood grain, marble patterns, or unique designs on a large number of architectural decorative glass surfaces, UV transfer printing technology offers a high-quality coating solution for decorative glass panels due to its high efficiency and low cost. Pattern variations are achieved by changing the film roll.
Frame Coating
As an innovative technology of Senlian, frame coating replaces the traditional screen printing process. It doesn’t need to make screen printing plates. The equipment uses laser scanning to accurately position and precisely apply paint or sealant to the frame or designated area of the glass surface. It is commonly used in building doors and windows, and in automobile glass.
What is Silver-Plated Glass Protective Coating?
As an innovative technology, Senlian’s silver-plated glass protective coating line can be seamlessly integrated into the back end of the Low-E coating line. Operating at 60 m/min, it delivers micron-level precision coating and rapid curing within seconds, providing comprehensive, reliable, and long-lasting protection for high-value glass, including double-silver, triple-silver, and quadruple-silver glass. Compared with traditional film application and powder coating processes, it offers the following significant advantages:
- Extending Anti-Oxidation Time: By applying a specialised coating layer to the surface of the silver plating, contact between the polished surface and water vapour is effectively blocked, significantly enhancing the anti-oxidation performance of the silver plating layer. Its anti-oxidation time can be extended to over 12 months.
- Enhancing Protection Performance: This high-hardness coating provides comprehensive protection during glass stacking, transportation, and further processing, preventing glass breakage, scratches, or contamination. It also prevents glass from sticking together during stacking, allowing for quick separation in processing without the need for additional cleaning tools or steps.
- Enhancing Glass Utilization Rate: During the deep processing of glass, there is no need to remove the protective film. Large-format flat glass can be directly cut, edged, cleaned, and tempered according to order requirements. The remaining silver-plated glass will still be protected for a long time without losing its original function.
- Reducing Tempering Time: In the glass tempering process, the special coating layer significantly enhances the glass surface’s heat absorption efficiency through its unique physical properties, thereby shortening the tempering time and significantly reducing energy consumption by about 15-20%.
What are the spray coating processes for Painted Glass?
Painted glass, after being processed from raw sheets and undergoing cutting, edge grinding, cleaning, and tempering, typically undergoes one or more of the following coating processes: pre-treatment, primer, drying, preheating, topcoat, drying, cooling, and marking.
- Pre-treatment: By washing and drying to eliminate stubborn dust and impurities, the glass is ensured to enter the coating process in the best condition.
- Primer Coating: The compatible spraying system evenly applies primer onto glass, followed by rapid drying. This treatment enhances interlayer adhesion for subsequent topcoats and produces a richer, higher-quality coating.
- IR Preheating: Infrared heating of the glass to 55-60 degrees Celsius allows for better bonding between the topcoat and primer.
- Topcoating: The topcoat coating determines the appearance and properties of painted glass. Based on the ideal coating effect, solid organic, metallic, glass enamel or water-based coatings are selected and applied evenly using an appropriate spraying method to enhance the product’s visual appeal.
- Drying and Cooling: During the infrared heating and drying process, the solvents in the coating evaporate rapidly, eliminating defects such as bubbles and unevenness in the coating. The coating dries completely from the inside out within minutes. The subsequent air-cooling process rapidly cools the glass, allowing it to be safely handled and packaged.
- Marking: Leave your brand logo on the glass surface to give it greater value.
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Comprehensive Glass Coating Solution
Before sales, we offer a comprehensive glass coating solution, including raw materials, coatings, equipment, and environmental facilities. After sales, we provide pre-shipment simulated production testing, installation, training, production support, and online assistance to fully ensure your glass coating quality and efficiency exceed expectations.
