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Overview

UV LED curing technology is ideally suited for the wood coatings industry for applications such as edge coating, roller coating and digital printing.

UV LED lamps offer significant advantages over traditional UV lamps for wood finishing, including less space, maintenance and downtime which translates into higher productivity rates, less scrap and higher quality end products at lower costs. The use of traditional UV lamps to cure coatings on heat-sensitive substrates such as glued veneers and resinous woods (such as pine) causes damage to the substrate and increases scrap rates. UV LEDs produce significantly less heat, enabling coating of heat-sensitive wood substrates. Due to high operating efficiency and water-cooling a UV LED light source generates very little heat. The surface temperature of a UV LED light source is low, about 40–50°C, which results in very low product surface temperatures. Traditional UV units convert 65–70 % of their input power into heat.

Watch this video to learn how UV LED technology drastically reduces energy consumption and significantly reduces work-piece surface temperature.

Wood Coatings Applications Brochure

Edge Coating

Edge Coating lines utilize UV LED to ensure consistent, high-quality results. Machines can be made more compact due to small form factor; speed can be increased due to consistent UV output; and the diffuse nature of UV LED light can be used to more effectively cure shaped surfaces which previously required multiple mercury lamps at various angles.


Roller Coating

UV LED is a perfect match for roller coating lines, both for gelling and full-cure stations. The benefits include better factory floor utilization due to shorter, more efficient lines; increased uptime with no degradation in UV output, cheaper input stock due to lack of infrared heat; and reduced operating costs by more efficient electricity use and no need for costly air ducting systems.

Case Study (PDF):
Robert Bürkle GmbH of Germany implements curing system for the single-sided curing of UV lacquers using Phoseon Technology’s UV LED technology. This new curing technology has the possibility to cure UV lacquer with drastically reduced energy consumption and significantly reduced work-piece surface temperature.


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Digital Printing

While technically not a wood application, creating a wood-grain look on diverse materials is made possible with UV LED and ink-jet printing. By using a combination of pinning and full-cure lamps, realistic ‘look’ and more importantly ‘feel’ is enabled by creating texture to mimic the grains of natural wood. This is especially valuable in decorative and accent applications.

Barberán utilizes UV LED curing technology for single pass digital printing Barberán utilizes Phoseon’s UV LED light sources to increase the speed and improve the quality of print, including gloss and matte control for decorative printing on boards.

Hymmen has selected Phoseon as a technology supplier of UV LED curing systems for the JUPITER Digital Printing Line to be displayed at Ligna 2013 in Hanover, Germany. UV LED curing technology is ideally suited for the wood coatings industry for applications such as edge coating, roller coating and digital printing. UV LED technology drastically reduces energy consumption and significantly reduces work-piece surface temperature.