Aerospace Manufacturing hears how one of Mankiewicz’s paint stripping ‘coating concepts of the future’ is helping to make life a whole lot easier for Boeing 787 operators.
Mankiewicz is one of Germany's traditional paint manufacturers and among the leaders in the production of both solvent-based and water-dilutable high-tech coating systems for industrial series production. The company, certified according to ISO 9001, IATF 16949, EN9100, ISO 14001 and ISO 50001, and is one of the market leaders in the business of painting aircraft.
What especially characterises its offer is its large product portfolio and individual, customised solutions. Indeed, Mankiewicz says its in-house team continually analyses the trends in all fields and develops paints derived from these for aircraft – the resulting offer is a wide variety of colours, effects and gloss levels, which in turn make it possible to satisfy the individual wishes of airlines.
Thanks to its especially robust, simple and safe application that enables good application and stripping, Mankiewicz says that Boeing has recently qualified as an optimal solution a further product of coatings manufacturer its CELEROL IntermediateCoat 990-09.
The first Boeing 787 aircraft to use this selective strippable system is already complete and the advantages of the CELEROL IntermediateCoat are clearly visible: The system is particularly characterised by its robustness, its simple and safe application and providing significant savings of time and cost. CELEROL IntermediateCoat can now be used for painting in production and refurbishment of B787 aircraft.
The factors that helped Boeing decide for CELEROL IntermediateCoat were not only that the system acts as a barrier and enables good stripping, but also the excellent application features of the product. The system allows to use special chemicals for stripping, which are less aggressive than conventional ones, making it safer for the environment as well as for the staff using it.
Stripped for action!
After aircraft have reached the end of a maintenance cycle, they must be repainted according to OEM specifications. To avoid adding unnecessary additional weight, the old paint system must first be removed. This is normally done by chemical stripping. Chemical strippers normally work well on the aluminium skins of aircraft. However, modern aircraft, such as the Airbus A350 or Boeing 787 are mainly made of composite materials, which can suffer from a chemical stripping process. The only alternative would be to sand down the old coating layers: a mechanical process that is labour intensive and costly. It also results in the painting process getting very long, requiring the aircraft to remain longer on the ground for maintenance and consequently impacting the airlines by loss of service revenue.
For that reason, OEMs require what are known as a selective strippable system for aircraft made of composites. This consists of a barrier layer that prevents the stripper from attacking the layers below it and the composite, which remain completely intact. As well as making the time-consuming process of sanding down the aircraft unnecessary, it also saves reapplying the basic primer and the exterior primer.
Mankiewicz CELEROL IntermediateCoat 990-09 has also been qualified by Airbus for many years and is routinely used for production aircraft.
