VirtualPaintShop® - towards the virtual process chain in painting.

Painting of complex structures, like car bodies, requires many steps in manufacturing for pre-treatment, cleaning, phosphating, electrocoating, pneumatic of electrostatic coat application, thermal drying or ultraviolet curing, cavity protection and others.

To ensure high quality of paint and efficient processes, reduce paint errors and consumption of resources, improve corrosion protection, avoid unnecessary design iterations by means of frontloading, computer based simulation can be used to assess and optimize individual steps in manufacturing or in the design of the product to be coated. VirtualPaintShop®, developed by CADFEM since 1997 supplies such analysis capabilities.

The primary goals for the development of VirtualPaintShop® are ease-of-use, speed of analysis, integration in existing development processes and supply of the full set of tools for painting relevant simulation.