Powder Coating Robot: Gemmer's Bed to ABB Arms

A powder coating robot does a job that once belonged to a worker with a spray gun in a dusty booth. Powder coating puts a dry, solvent free finish on oven cavities, bicycle frames, aluminium window profiles and much else, and in September 2026 AkzoNobel opened a new lab in the Netherlands to develop powders that cure at lower temperatures. This post follows the process from wet spray painting and Erwin Gemmer's fluidised bed of the 1950s to electrostatic guns and robots on hang lines, and looks at where ABB arms and RobotStudio fit.

Aluminium extrusions hanging in an automatic booth while powder coating is sprayed onto them. Photo: Euro Quality Coatings / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

How metal parts were painted before powder and robots

For most of the 20th century metal goods were finished with liquid paint. Painters sprayed it with compressed air guns in booths, wearing masks against the solvent fumes, and the parts were hung or racked to dry. In 1942 the paint shop at Handley Page's factory in Cricklewood sprayed whole Halifax bombers this way, with paper taped over the glass. Spraying worked on almost anything, but a lot of the paint missed the part, and the solvents evaporated into the air.

Spray painters at work on a Halifax bomber in the Handley Page paint shop at Cricklewood, 1942. Photo: Ministry of Information Photo Division via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Powder coating started in Germany in the 1950s. The scientist Erwin Gemmer developed a fluidised bed method for coating metal with plastic powder; a German patent application was filed in May 1953 and the patent was issued in 1955. A hot part was dipped into a tank of powder kept moving by air blown from below, and the powder melted onto it. Between 1958 and 1965 almost all powder coatings went on this way, mostly as thick functional films of nylon, polyethylene or PVC.

Elizabeth Little spraying small parts at the Heil Company in Milwaukee, 1943. Photo: Howard R. Hollem, Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Spraying the powder came next. Electrostatic powder spraying was developed in the early 1960s, reached the market between 1962 and 1964 and soon overtook the fluidised bed. A corona gun gives the powder a negative charge so that it is pulled onto the grounded part. A tribo gun charges the powder by friction inside a Teflon tube instead, which avoids some corona problems such as the Faraday cage effect, where charged powder struggles to reach inside corners. After spraying, the part goes through an oven, where common powders cure at about 200 °C for ten minutes, and the overspray can be collected and used again.

A worker coats a metal furniture part with an electrostatic powder gun, 2016. Photo: Alexandros T / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Powder coating lines and ABB robots today

On most powder lines today, an overhead conveyor carries hanging parts through pretreatment, the spray booth and the curing oven. Fixed guns on reciprocators move up and down to coat simple, flat parts, and people with hand guns touch up the corners. Recycling the overspray gets harder when several colours share one booth. The powders are changing too. AkzoNobel's €7.5 million lab at Sassenheim, opened on 2 September, concentrates on lower temperature curing to cut energy use, and IFS Coatings has announced a new US production facility in Elkhart.

A part hung from an overhead conveyor ready for a coating booth. Photo: Hardcoreraveman / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

ABB has documented at least one powder line. At Electrolux's plant in Dudley Park, South Australia, four ABB IRB 2400 robots mounted upside down move Nordson powder nozzles over oven and grill cavities. The cavities hang from a conveyor that runs at up to 3.2 metres per minute, and the line coats up to 240 items an hour, more than 2,000 a day, for over 120 oven models. Electrolux reported 10 percent better use of coating material and energy savings of up to 15 percent compared with the old wet enamel process. On that old line, workers loaded each cavity onto a station that flooded its inside with wet enamel, cleared the excess by hand and then sent it to another manual spray station.

An ABB IRB 2600 industrial robot at work in a production cell. Photo: ABB

On that line the robots' IRC5 controller monitors the moving conveyor. ABB's conveyor tracking lets a fixed arm coat an item while it travels past. The company's current paint robot, the IRB 5500, is built to work safely in the explosive air of paint booths, and clouds of fine powder raise the same concern. Paint robot paths are usually planned offline in RobotStudio with the Paint PowerPac add in, so engineers can program and simulate them before anyone enters the booth. Our post on thermal spray coating covers a related job.

An ABB IRB 5500 paint robot, a design built to work in explosive paint booth air. Photo: ABB

Where robotic powder coating goes next

Most of the open problems come down to flexibility. Reciprocators work well for long runs of similar parts, but job shops coat a different mix every day, and Electrolux chose robots partly because its site makes over 120 oven models. Smaller coaters run into cost, since a robot, its powder equipment and an Ex rated booth add up quickly. At Electrolux the investment was expected to pay for itself through savings within two years. Programming is the other hurdle: spray paths for every new part still need someone who understands both the robot and the powder.

Two Wagner powder spray guns, a tribo gun and a corona gun, side by side. Photo: Hardcoreraveman / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Offline programming helps with that. In RobotStudio, engineers can import a CAD model of a part, generate spray paths, check them for reach and collisions and send the program to the robot without stopping the line. Lower cure temperatures, the goal of AkzoNobel's new lab, would let lines coat heat sensitive materials and spend less energy in the oven. Coaters will still need staff trained on both powder guns and robot software.

An engineer programs a robot cell in RobotStudio next to an ABB industrial robot. Photo: ABB

At home, powder coating is the finish on fridges, garden furniture, bike frames and radiators. Repair shops are taking it up as well: in September a collision centre in Jersey City added in house powder coating. Robots will not reach small shops like that soon. In factories they already make the steady, repetitive passes while people check the corners and the colour. The rest of the industry will follow at a pace set by robot prices, by how easy programming becomes and by how well robots cope with frequent colour changes.

Two powder coated bicycle frames and a powder coated rear rack. Photo: 802bikeguy / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

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