UFI – Rotary Atomiser

The Italian Company of UFI SPA - Universal Filter Italiana of Nogarole Rocca, Verona, is a world leader in the production of air and oil filtres for the automotive industry. Its main Customers are carmakers, primarily Ferrari, whose Formula 1 engine it prepared, and Fiat.
The Objectives to Achieve includes the following:
• Set up a plant to produce 2,400 oil filtres an hour. Filtre diameter ranges from 70 to 120 and height from 60 to 250 millimetres.
• Apply single component solvent paints to minimise overspray, maximise system transfer efficiency and minimise production, waste disposal, cab maintenance and cleaning costs.
 Previous Situation
The Customer used high-pressure compressed air pump powered electrostatic airless automatic guns. On reviewing system performance with data from the study by Modena NHS Agency 16, the National Association of Painters ANVER and paint producer INVER SpA, UFI system efficiency was found to be 65%. This meant that of 100 parts of product sprayed, only 65 rested on the component, while the remaining were sucked by the cab and disposed of as waste.
 Present Situation
After reviewing production data and product type, we decided that maximum technology objective achievable was to install a rotary atomiser and modify the paint feed system.

Central Supply Plant
As the picture shows, the paint feed system was equipped on line with Nordson 25B 4:1 piston pumps fed from 100 litre stainless steel tanks. Reduced compression pumps were added to transform the system into a low pressure operating unit to enable use of the rotating cup.

Rotating Cup
With the existing cab, we changed standard rotating cup by dedicating it exclusively to the production of UFI SpA. As the picture shows, when the cup delivers the paint over 360°, it rests on ground connected filtres and attract even the smallest product particles, reduce over-spray and exponentially increase system efficiency.

Coppa Rotante 
 Advantages
This resulted in:
• 26% increase from 65 to 88%.
• 65% reduced over spray
All this led to:
• Less paint consumption
• Decreased paint disposal costs
• Decreased cab maintenance and cleaning costs and duration

The application presented herein was completed in 1999
The installed system was still capable of ensuring full production in July 2003, even with marked productivity increase achieved by UFI. In full compliance with the data presented by calculation tables, the Customer identified reduced consumption and plant management costs equivalent to some 30%. Moreover, UFI also addressed passage to water soluble paints instead of solvent based ones to adapt the system to standing regulations. In this case no change to applications had to be made with greater investments, as the plant had been designed to operate both with mono and two-component water-soluble products.