Transform Your Coating Process

Industrial process control

Know the coating thickness before the oven.
Especially where the coating is hardest to control.

In most powder coating operations, final film thickness is confirmed only after curing.

But by then, the part has already consumed:
● Powder.
● Oven energy.
● Production time.
● Line capacity.
And if the thickness is wrong, the coating is already cured.

PaintChecker enables contactless measurement of freshly applied powder before curing, giving production teams earlier visibility into coating thickness and process variation.

Reduce rework. Improve first-pass yield.

Move from reactive inspection to proactive process control.

Detect variation while there is still time to respond.

Evaluate your application

Start with your actual part, coating, substrate, and measurement position.

No purchase decision is required

We solve

The problem is not measuring coating thickness.

It is finding out problem too late.

Late detection of defects

A coated part can look acceptable while its film thickness is already outside the desired range. Depending on the process, variation can result from:
● Gun settings
● Part geometry
● Operator technique
● Conveyor speed
● Powder characteristics
● Color changes
● Robot programming
● Distance and angle
● Process drift

Traditional dry-film gauges are valuable for confirming the finished coating. But they normally tell you what happened after the coating has been cured. If the result is outside specification, the production process may already have continued under the same conditions.

One Out-of-Spec Part May Not Be Just One Part.

The hidden cost of late detection

Between application and final inspection, the line continues running.

If coating variation is discovered only after curing, the impact may include:

Rework

Parts may need to be recoated, repaired, stripped, or processed again.

Lost Production Capacity

Rework consumes capacity that could otherwise be used for new production.

Additional Powder

Over-application and recoating increase material consumption.

Additional Inspection

Teams spend time checking, documenting, investigating, and re-approving parts.

Additional Oven Energy

A reworked part may require another curing cycle.

Quality Risk

If variation reaches downstream processes or the customer, the consequences become significantly more serious.

Solutions

Earlier process visibility

Measure before cure

Traditional workflow:
Coat → Cure → Measure → Discover the Result
At this point, the coating is already fixed.

With PaintChecker:
Coat → Measure → Adjust if Necessary → Cure

Moving coating thickness measurement earlier changes its role. It becomes less about simply confirming the finished result and more about understanding and controlling the process.

From final inspection data to actionable process information.
CONTACTLESS MEASUREMENT

The most important areas are often...the hardest to measure.

Measure on critical geometries

Real industrial parts are not flat test panels. They include:
● Edges
● Corners
● Curved surfaces
● Recesses
● Narrow areas
● Steps
● Welded structures
● Complex geometries

These can also be the areas where coating thickness varies most. Because PaintChecker measures without contact, it can provide access to measurement positions that may be difficult for conventional contact-based methods, subject to the specific geometry and application conditions.

Do not only measure the easiest surface.

Measure the areas that actually matter to the finished part.

Measure without touching the surface

Contactless measurement

The photothermal coating thickness measurement is a contactless measurement method for paints, powder coatings and glazes on metallic and non-metallic substrates. The different thermal properties of the coating and the substrate are used to determine the coating thickness.

The surface of the coating is warmed up by a few degrees with a short, intense light pulse and then cools down again by dissipating the heat into deeper areas. The thinner the coating, the faster the temperature drops. The temperature curve over time is recorded with a highly sensitive infrared sensor and converted into the coating thickness.

Explore the measurement principle

Products

Flexible deployment

PaintChecker products

Start with manual measurement. Expand to automation when it makes sense.

PaintChecker Mobile

Flexible, contactless measurement for process engineers, quality teams and paint shop personnel.

Ideal for:
* Process optimisation
* Troubleshooting
* Line setup
* Manual quality checks
* New product introduction
* Critical-area measurement

PaintChecker Industrial

Automated coating thickness measurement for production systems, robotic cells and inline applications.

Designed for manufacturers that want continuous process visibility and automated quality control.

Ideal for:
* Automated inspection
* Robotic measurement
Inline monitoring
* Process documentation
* High-volume production
* Smart manufacturing systems

Explore PaintChecker mobile

Explore PaintChecker Industrial

PaintChecker video

PaintChecker mobile measure on car rim

00:34

Cube Sensor on Model-Robot

01:25

PaintChecker Mobile Pen on tractor hydraulics

01:38

PaintChecker Industrial Tube HP checks inner coating of pressure vessel

01:04

More than a thickness sensor

From measurement to process control

The important question is:

What can your production team do differently because the information is available earlier? Potential value areas include:

Earlier Detection

Identify coating variation before the part completes the curing process.

Better Process Control

Use objective measurement information alongside operator experience.

Faster Process Adjustment

Respond sooner when application conditions change.

Better Material Control

Investigate whether excessive coating can be reduced without compromising quality.

Reduced Rework Risk

Reduce the likelihood of discovering thickness problems only after curing.

Greater Quality Confidence

Know more about the coating before the part enters the oven.

First prove that it works

Then Decide Whether It Is Worth Implementing.

A PaintChecker evaluation should answer two separate questions.

Technical Question
Can the required coating be measured reliably under the relevant production conditions?

Business Question
Would receiving this information earlier create enough operational value to justify implementation?

We recommend answering the technical question first. Only then should you build the business case.

Evaluate your application

No commitment to purchase. Start by confirming technical relevance.

Case studies

Proven in production

What actually happened on the floor

Powder coating XXL part — "Coating thickness measurements with PaintChecker save more than 1000 EUR per scrap part."

On the oversized line, a loading bridge close to a ton hangs at an angle, 250 mm from the gun at the top, over 400 mm at the bottom. In graphite grey (RAL 7024), a massively undercoated part looks flawless to the naked eye. The old way, you'd learn the truth only after the oven, and then that ton of steel travels the entire line a second time, roughly €1,000 per part, gone. Now the operator verifies the manual touch-up zones and weld seams before the part reaches the oven. The plant reports undercoating virtually eliminated, a much more stable process, and confirms the investment was already paid back on avoided re-runs alone, even with 16 to 20 automatic guns and part-geometry scanners already in place.

Battery cell insulation — Due to the tiny, point-shaped measuring spot, even the smallest components can be precisely measured.

The photothermal measurement method provides a fast and convenient way to determine coating thickness with accurate, reproducible result. Ultra-thin insulation coating on aluminum battery housings is safety-critical, too thick or too thin and the cell risks failure. The line had extreme space constraints and short cycle times, demanding non-contact measurement at multiple points at once. Compact photothermal sensors, only 40 mm deep and 150 g, were co-developed and integrated into the PLC-controlled line in four months. The result: a standard deviation below 0.5 µm across 2,900 continuous measurements, real-time non-destructive validation of every cell, feeding battery safety and throughput at the same time.

High-speed automotive parts — 100% inline measurement at 150 parts a minute.

Parking-sensor caps have brutally narrow tolerances, a few microns too thick and the ultrasonic membrane can't oscillate, so the distance reading fails; too thin and corrosion protection goes. Parts are tiny (roughly 20 mm diameter), curved, and densely packed, with under 0.5 seconds per measurement and no room to spare. The system measures the powder while it's still soft, inline, at about 150 parts per minute, every value logged to the PLC and central database and shown on line-side monitors. Operators see trends drift toward the limits and correct before anything escapes. It has run in continuous multi-shift production for over 15 years on a single circuit-board replacement.

Rail vehicle coating — the early process control thanks to the non-contact layer thickness measurement is extremely valuable because the measurement results can be evaluated and assessed very early

A powderer finishes a large rail component and lifts the 50-gram sensor to the back face, the "averted" side that always ran thin. Three LED dots line up, trigger pressed, and in under a second the reading comes back low. He adjusts the gun and re-sprays the still-soft powder right there. That part enters the oven correct. Before, that low reading only appeared after baking and cooling, by which point every part behind the booth had inherited the same defect. Now the mass-scrap event that used to define a bad day simply doesn't happen. The plant runs dozens of daily checks with minimal effort, fully aligned to DB and QIB documentation standards, and operators control quality at the booth instead of firefighting at the oven exit.

High-mix powder coating — Rework? That is a thing of the past.

With PaintChecker mobile, we get to target much faster to meet our quality standard. A plant runs over 1,000 different coatings a year, from small medical housings to 7-meter structures, across automatic 8-gun booths, manual booths, and a sample booth, with constant color changes. Every changeover was a fresh chance to run out of tolerance, and contact gauges only confirmed it 30 minutes to hours later. The mobile system measures 20 to 250 µm on any color or material, steel, aluminum, medical parts, on a single factory calibration, no recalibration per surface. Operators fine-tune at the booth exit, skip sampling steps, start production faster, and reach for the parts, edges, and curves that used to be blind spots.

R&D lab — Leatherette: Precise testing of clear coat on plastic film

An application chemist develops a clear anti-creak coating around 15 µm on soft grained leatherette. For years the only "measurement" was to coat a metal dummy alongside and hope the number transferred, a contact probe just deforms the soft surface and lies. Thickness scatter ran over 80 µm, and parts squeaked with no clear cause. Now she measures the real substrate directly, correlates true film build to the stick-slip test in front of her, and pins down the exact thickness window where the squeak disappears. Days of indirect trial-and-error collapse into an afternoon of real data

Wet paint on chrome — “ Checking the coating thickness distribution in the wet state while programming the line, significantly increases the quality".

A premium finishing plant runs 20,000+ chrome sanitary parts a week plus automotive trim and consumer electronics. Contact and eddy-current gauges failed completely on chrome, so thickness could only be checked after curing, sometimes by destructively grinding the part. A competitor device was aborted mid-test by the production team. PaintChecker was the only system that reliably measured wet film on chrome in series production. Painters stopped over-spraying "just in case," cut material consumption, and programming engineers finally saw real-time film distribution during robot path creation, turning trial-and-error into confirmed uniformity before the run.

See it in your own part

Stop paying for rework after the oven.

Find out what it's costing you, before the oven decides.

Test PaintChecker on your own parts and powder, your own conditions.

A feasibility test on your production reality.

Request a feasibility test

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