Today is the last day of Eurosurfas 2014, the biggest surface treatment event in Spain. We had four intense days of learning and we could discover the latest news and trends of the sector.

During these days we had the chance to see several breakthroughs, however we want to highlight a couple of news that will have a notorious impact in the near furure.

1. Without any doubt the main advance has been the suppression of phosphating pretreatment, so that the electrophoresis process is performed in conjunction with the phosphating. This is a brand new technology developed by Henkel and it represents an important change regarding the processed volume (reduced to less than a half) and the environmental impact, thanks to the elimination of substances such as nickel and manganese, witch after the Chromo VI disappearing where considered the most dangerous ones.
   This breakthrough will affect the pretreatment process of ensambled car pieces and it will propably extend to others fields of application, therefore specialists should adapt quickly to this new methodology.
   Anyway, this change is transitory until the development of mixed blendings (organic and inorganic) is finally finished, expected in 4 years from now.
2. The second big news, revealed from our friend Massimo Malavolti, main editor of the sector, comes from the concept “Lean”, applied both in Spot Repair and convecional repairing, witch are hitting hard in the Eurocar Congress, realized in conjunction with the fair. The objective of the concept is to realize flexible and user-oriented machines, that could also reduce energy consumption. This product line is a strong bet of Lagos and it has been developed since 2007 with the TROTTER Series, where the Paint Trotter Refinish represents the state-of-the-art given its high versatility and adjusted energy consumption and operative costs. Furthermore, the comventional painting series, attached to a PA (preparation area), configures our QRC (Quick Repair Concept), reporting a up to 30% of time saving on the cycle and big benefits for the final client and the car workshop.
3. Advances on filters have been another great news. IFT Filters and Edrizzi, guided by Stéphane Cardo and Paco Postigo, have been given us fresh updates on new possibilities with high capacity filters.

Simultaneously to Eurosurface, two other big fairs of the chemical sector have taken place: Expoquimia and Equiplast, were the biggest highlights came from robotization sulutions, fully applicable to painting process, like the ones Lagos developed with great success for wind tower blades.

 Robotized Wind Blade tower painting system: