Toyota invents airless paint atomizer with 95% coating efficiency

MANILA: Ever seen a car getting spray-painted and see how much of the paint gets wasted as pressurized air blasts it onto the surface? Well, that will soon be a thing of the past.

Toyota Motor Corporation (TMC) has just created a new type of paint atomizer that doesn’t use air. Instead, it uses electrostatic atomization to charge the paint particles to gravitate and coat the vehicle body. The result is called electrostatic painting. This new process reduces atomized particles that scatter, and achieves 95% coating efficiency, the highest in the world.

The tip of the airless paint atomizer has 600 special grooves that rotate to create centrifugal force which induces paint to flow into the grooves and atomize through static electricity.

It’s the first of its kind in the world and a stark improvement from the 60 to 70% efficiency of conventional painters. Plus, it also reduces the CO²emissions of the painting process by 7%.

This is just part and parcel of TMC’s advancing initiatives to achieve its Plant Zero CO2 Emissions Challenge, one of the targets included in the Toyota Environmental Challenge 2050 announced in 2015. As part of this effort, it developed the airless paint atomizer and deployed it at both Takaoka and Tsutsumi Plants. Gradual deployment at other plants is planned as well as consideration of deployment among other Toyota Group companies and licensing the technology to other companies.