Portable Paint Spray Booths for Waterborne Spray Paint
If you’re considering a portable paint spray booth for waterborne paints, you’re probably doubly concerned about dry times and cure quality.
For one, waterborne paint has a reputation for being difficult to work with — or at least it requires a different approach than traditional solve-based paints.
Second, lots of questions arise about the ability of a portable spray booth to provide the right airflow and degree of environmental control to facilitate quality cures and expedited dry times. After all, many manufacturers of portable spray booths are still trying to convince you that their products will keep overspray off of surrounding equipment outside their portable spray booths, which isn’t very reassuring.
At Duroair, we not only make portable spray booths, we also make retractable clean rooms. Our focus is on developing technologies that allow our clients to access modular controlled environments when and where they need them. When it comes to portable spray booths, we’ve developed a patented airflow technology called Taper-Draft, which is ideal for waterborne paint drying.
Below, we’ll run through the different types of airflow technology that can be used to dry waterborne paints and discuss why Taper-Draft — which is available as part of any Duroair portable spray booth installation — makes the most sense.
Waterborne Paint Drying Needs
In essence, proper waterborne paint curing requires low humidity and the correct type of air movement.
Waterborne paint is also much more sensitive to contamination than solvent-based coatings, which means that clean air — typically accomplished through multi-stage filtration — is crucial.
Additionally, if one is going to cure waterborne paint efficiently, one needs to promote increased airflow across the surface of the paint, rather than directly into the coating.
Downdraft Spray Booth Technology
As the market moves from solvent-based to waterborne paints to mitigate volatile organic compounds (VOCs), it’s understandable that portable spray booth manufacturers — and paint booth companies in general — have attempted to adapt traditional downdraft booths.
This has led to several approaches, including downdraft side exhaust booths and semi-downdraft booths. All of these variations attempt to overcome the persistent limitations of downdraft technology when it comes to waterborne coatings but never completely succeed. No matter how they are supplemented with accelerated airflow systems or humidity controls, they fundamentally direct air into the paint, rather than across it.
Cross-Draft Spray Booth Technology
By creating horizontal airflow, cross-draft paint booths direct airflow across paint, rather than into it. This suits waterborne finishes.
However, cross-draft airflow patterns have a high likelihood of contaminating a paint job by blowing overspray from one end of a paint booth to the other.
Moreover, especially in portable spray booth applications where floors aren’t always cleaned to ideal paint-booth standards, the airflow pattern also has a tendency to lift dirt from a shop floor and drop it onto curing paint.
Taper-Draft Spray Booth Technology
Like cross-draft technology, Taper-Draft directs airflow across painted surfaces, creating optimal conditions for waterborne paint curing.
While it does this, it also creates an envelope of clean air around the work piece by employing a high-volume clean air intake filter on one end of the portable spray booth enclosure and a two-stage tapered filter chamber on the other. This combination of rigorous filtration and protective clean-air envelope ensures that any chances of contamination are minimized.
In the process of creating its clean-air envelope, Taper-Draft also facilitates a wicking process, pulling moisture off of work pieces. This makes Taper-Draft an especially ideal technology for waterborne paints as it reduces any chance of vapor entrapment and speeds up dry times.
With no drying aids necessary, a portable spray booth equipped with Taper-Draft technology achieves faster dry times than both downdraft and cross-draft paint booths.
Finding the Ideal Portable Waterborne Spray Paint Booth
The clean air experts at Duroair spent years developing our patented Taper-Draft airflow technology specifically with the idea of aiding manufacturers and shop owners who want to — or have to — use waterborne paints. Making it a feature available with our portable spray booths was a must as we believe in giving our customers the maximum amount of control over their workspaces and production processes.
To learn more about Duroair’s patented Taper-Draft technology, watch one of our collapsible paint booths come to life.
Or to discuss your specific portable spray booth needs, please request a consultation with one of our clean air experts.
