The grinding of solid materials to produce powders is a common manufacturing step found in many industries. In the coatings industry, grinding may be used in the preparation of pigments and of powder coatings. Of particular focus in this article is an application solution successfully deployed in the production of powder coatings. In the powder coating industry, several different types of polymeric matrices are dealt with. These include epoxies, epoxy polyesters, polyesters, acrylics and polyurethanes. Each material has its own mechanical and physical properties, but, when converting any of them from feedstock chips to ground powder, the friction of the grinding process itself generates a sufficient amount of heat to cause a quality problem resulting from the agglomeration ("clumping") of partially melted powder particles or heat-induced changes in ground material properties. This problem is worse when the ambient temperature is high.
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