Investigations of spray painting processes using an airless spray gun

This paper presents experimental and numerical studies on spray painting processes by using airless spray guns for ship painting. A computational fluid dynamics code was applied to calculate the flow field and the droplet trajectories. Droplet size distributions and droplet velocities as necessary inlet characteristics for the simulations were experimentally obtained using a Spraytec Fraunhofer type particle sizer and Laser-Doppler Anemometry. Effects of shoreline winds and painting distance on the transfer efficiency and on the paint film thickness distri-butions on the target are numerically studied