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Numerical and experimental study of spray coating using air-

assisted high pressure atomizers

Article in Atomization and Sprays · January 2015

DOI: 10.1615/AtomizSpr.2015010791

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 Atomization and Sprays, 25 (8): 643–656 (2015)

NUMERICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL STUDY

OF SPRAY COATING USING AIR-ASSISTED
HIGH-PRESSURE ATOMIZERS

Q. Ye,1,∗ B. Shen,2 O. Tiedje,1 T. Bauernhansl,1 & J. Domnick3

1
Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation,
Nobelstrasse 12, 70569 Stuttgart, Germany
2
University Stuttgart, Nobelstrasse 12, 70569 Stuttgart, Germany
3
University of Applied Sciences Esslingen, Kanalstrasse 33, 73728
Esslingen, Germany
∗
Address all correspondence to Q. Ye E-mail: qiaoyan.ye@ipa.fraunhofer.de

Original Manuscript Submitted: 01/26/2014; Final Draft Received: 09/27/2014

Airless and air-assisted high-pressure spray guns are widely used in the spray painting industry.
The present contribution summarizes ongoing investigations on the spray painting processes of these
two atomizers using real paint material. Atomization processes under airless and air-assisted con-
ditions were experimentally studied by measuring droplet size distributions and droplet velocities
using a Spraytec Fraunhofer-type particle sizer and laser-Doppler anemometry. A computational
fluid dynamics code was applied to calculate the flow field and the droplet trajectories. The measured
and calculated film thickness distributions on the substrate were compared. The experimental and
simulation results provided the necessary information for understanding the painting process using
airless and air-assisted systems and for improving the performance of these atomizers.

KEY WORDS: spray coating, air-assisted spray gun, droplet size and deposition

1. INTRODUCTION

During the last 10 years, detailed experimental and numerical investigations of painting
processes by using different atomizers, such as high-speed rotary bells with electrostatic
support, pneumatic application using coaxial jet type atomizers, and powder coating,
have been carried out at the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and
Automation (IPA) (Ye and Pulli, 2010; Ye et al., 2003, 2013; Domnick et al., 2005,
2006). The main task of these investigations was to calculate the film thickness distribu-
tion and the transfer efficiency (amount of paint reaching the work piece) for a given set
of application parameters and boundary conditions. Since there are no practical physi-
cal models that can be used to predict disintegration process and spray formation, spray

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644 Ye et al.

painting process simulations can be only carried out if certain boundary conditions and
initial characteristics of the spray, for example, drop velocity, drop size distribution, and
mass flux, are provided. Based on experimentally obtained initial and boundary condi-
tions, an appropriate injection model has already been successfully applied to the spray
painting simulation using a pneumatic atomizer (Ye and Pulli, 2010). The film thickness
distribution on complicated targets and with arbitrary alignments of the atomizer could
be predicted.
The present contribution describes the results of investigations aiming to extend
these activities to the paint application with typical flat jet airless and air-assisted high-
pressure atomizers. The latter, in the field also known as AirCoat or AirMix, is basically
a flat jet airless atomizer with additional air flow for improved atomization and homoge-
nization of the spray cone. For instance, the tailing effect at the edge of the spray pattern
of the airless atomizer can be improved by using air-assisted atomization. Compared
to the well-known air spray painting, the spray transfer efficiencies of airless and air-
assisted atomizers are significantly higher, corresponding to less overspray.
Experimental studies involving spray painting using airless guns have been per-
formed by Settles (1997) and Plesniak et al. (2004). They focused their studies mainly on
effects of application parameters on the spray transfer efficiency in painting booths, for
example, paint mass flow rate, gun-to-target distance, and gun-to-target angle. Although
there are many computational studies of air-assisted sprays in the research area of fuel
injectors (Diwakar et al., 1992; Cheng and Lee, 2002), there are no detailed reports about
numerical simulations of spray painting using airless as well as air-assisted guns.
In the present investigation, Fraunhofer diffraction and laser-Doppler anemometry
(LDA) have to be applied in combination to provide the necessary input data for the
numerical simulations, that is, local droplet size distributions and droplet velocities.
A white base-coat paint material was used, which prevented us from using a phase-
Doppler anemometer (PDA) due to optical inhomogeneities. The numerical simulations
were performed by means of the commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solver
ANSYS-FLUENT. Film thickness distributions on flat targets and corresponding trans-
fer efficiencies were compared with experiments for model assessment.
The experimental results were further analyzed with respect to the influence of the
additional air flow in air-assisted mode on the atomization process. Here a comparison
between airless and air-assisted atomization should provide a deeper understanding of
the different painting qualities, for example, leveling and gloss, of these two atomizer
systems.

2. EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATIONS

The basic geometry of the air-assisted atomizer used in this study is shown in Fig. 1.
Pressure atomization as the major process is performed by applying pressures up to 250
bars through the central elliptically shaped paint nozzle. In the present contribution, an

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Spray Coating Using Air-Assisted High-Pressure Atomizers 645

Assist atomization
nozzles Shaping nozzles

FIG. 1: Air cap of the air-assisted atomizer and air channels inside the cap.

effective orifice diameter of 0.15 mm with a full spray cone angle of ∼80° was used.
In addition, so-called atomizing and shaping air are supplied through nozzles arranged
around the liquid nozzle. The atomizing air, which is supplied by a number of holes
arranged parallel to the major axis of the spray, has a significant influence on the atom-
ization process, as will be shown in what follows. By switching the atomizing air on
and off, the operation mode varies between airless and air assisted. The major purpose
of the shaping air supplied by holes located at the edge of the ellipsoid is to form the
spray cone. It was confirmed that its effect on atomization could be neglected. In Ta-
ble 1, properties of the paint material, major characteristics of the air-assisted gun, and
the specific operating conditions investigated are summarized.

TABLE 1: Experimental parameters

Item Parameter
Paint material Base coat: calcite white
Solid fraction, % 38
Density, g/ml
Wet 1.19
Dry film 1.96
Pressure supply, bar 120–200a
Assist atomizing air flow, L/min 114
Shaping air flow, L/min 13.9
Effective orifice diameter, mm ∼0.15
Spray angle, degrees ∼80
Gun-to-target distance, mm 200
Booth air velocity, m/s 0.3
a Corresponding to a paint mass flow rate of 5.53–7.45 g/s.

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646 Ye et al.

2.1 LDA Measurements

A DANTEC two-component backscatter fiber LDA system, equipped with a 5 W Ar-

ion laser, was applied in the present studies to obtain integral droplet velocities in the
spray jet. Figure 2 shows the setup of the LDA measurement. The axial velocity and
the velocity component in the direction of the jet spread were measured along the long
center line within the spray cross section 50 mm below the liquid nozzle. Figure 3 shows
the measured velocity profiles. It can be seen that the maximum droplet velocity in the
spray center is ∼65 m/s for the axial component and ∼20 m/s for the component in the jet

FIG. 2: Setup of LDA measurements.

FIG. 3: Measured axial and velocity components in the jet spread direction 50 mm below
the liquid nozzle.

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Spray Coating Using Air-Assisted High-Pressure Atomizers 647

spread direction, respectively, for the air-assisted system with a liquid pressure supply of
200 bar. The measured velocity profiles provide useful information for creating droplet
injection file in the following numerical study.

2.2 Droplet Size Measurement

Droplet size measurements were carried out applying a Malvern Spraytec Fraunhofer-
type particle sizer. Since the drop breakup process on the cross section 50 mm away from
the nozzle is not jet finished, a distance z of 100 mm from the nozzle was chosen for
droplet size measurements. As shown in Fig. 4, the laser beam of the Malvern Spraytec
was oriented along x. The spray gun that was mounted on a robot was traversed along
the major axis y of the elliptical spray cone. The measured results are actually averaged
values within the tube-shaped 9-mm-diameter measuring volume of the Malvern going
through the whole spray cone. To allow further comparisons, the droplet distributions
created by the airless gun, that is, without additional air flow, were also measured.
Figure 5 shows the droplet Sauter mean diameter (D3,2 ) distributions in the mea-
sured spray cone region at different liquid pressures for airless and air-assisted operation
modes. Owing to the geometrical arrangement of the atomizing air nozzles parallel to
the major axis of the spray, the spray cone shape preserves its original flat cross sec-
tion even under air-assisted conditions. As expected, the air-assist mode creates smaller
mean droplet diameters than the airless mode throughout the whole spray cone due to an
increased momentum exchange and higher Re numbers. However, the general trend of
the mean diameter profiles characterized by a significant increase of the values toward
the edge of the spray cone due to the disintegration of the rim of the film emerging from
the nozzle remains almost unchanged under both air-assisted and airless conditions.
Consistently, the effect of the additional atomizing air on the mean diameters dimin-
ishes with increasing pressure supply. This is especially true for the spray center region,
where the Sauter mean diameters are already below 13 µm under airless conditions.

FIG. 4: Schematic of the droplet size measurement setup.

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648 Ye et al.

FIG. 5: Sauter mean droplet diameter profiles at different liquid pressures.

The representative droplet size distributions for the measured spray cone, the so-
called integral droplet size distributions, as shown in Fig. 6 for the pressure supply of
160 bar, were calculated based on the individual size distributions and the measured
droplet concentration distributions (Ye and Pulli, 2010). The corresponding mean sizes

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Spray Coating Using Air-Assisted High-Pressure Atomizers 649

FIG. 6: Integral droplet size distributions for airless and air-assisted systems.

are D3,2 = 15.9 µm, Dv,50 = 20.1 µm for airless and D3,2 = 13.3 µm, Dv,50 = 17.3 µm
for air assist. The integral droplet size distribution is required in the numerical simula-
tions presented here.

2.3 Paint Film Thickness Measurement

Dynamic spray painting with a relative speed between gun and target of 0.25 m/s and a
gun-to-target distance of 200 mm was performed. The target, a flat panel with a size of
200 × 800 mm2 , was positioned vertically. The gun axis was traversed perpendicular to
the target surface so that the major axis of the spray pattern was formed along the 800
mm direction. After painting, the panel was put horizontally into an oven for baking. The
dry film thickness on the metallic panel was then measured by means of electromagnetic
induction probe. Figure 7 shows the mean values of the measured film thickness distri-
butions. In case of airless application, the film thickness is characterized by a significant
scatter, which is, however, further reduced by air assist. Since the shaping air flow rate
was relatively low in the present application, there is no significant difference of the
width of the spray pattern. The measured transfer efficiency of the paint application was
88% for the airless and 78% for the air-assisted system.

3. NUMERICAL SIMULATIONS
3.1 Computational Method
The commercial CFD code ANSYS-FLUENT 14.0, based on the finite-volume ap-
proach, was applied in the present numerical simulations. The gas phase was mod-
eled using the Eulerian conservation equations for mass, momentum, and energy. The
three-dimensional compressible airflow was calculated using a simple pressure-velocity

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650 Ye et al.

FIG. 7: Dynamic film thickness distributions under airless and air-assisted conditions.

coupling method. The turbulent transport was modeled using the realizable k-ε model
with the scalable standard wall function. An unstructured mesh with 1.5 million cells for
the computational domain with a size of 0.6 × 1.2 × 0.5 m3 was used.
As primary inlet boundary condition for the continuous phase, a booth air velocity
of 0.3 m/s, similar to the experimental condition, and the corresponding mass flow rates
of air as given in Table 1 for air nozzles were applied. The Lagrangian tracking method
was applied for the droplet phase.
As already mentioned, there are no appropriate quantitative models for the descrip-
tion of the film breakup process and the further droplet formation available. Conse-
quently, the simulation of the painting process relies on measured inlet conditions such
as droplet velocity, diameter, and concentration. From the simulation point of view, these
inlet conditions should be set as close to the nozzle as possible to avoid any interaction
with the flow field downstream and the considered target geometry. On the other hand,
the restrictions of the measurement techniques to collect the necessary data must be con-
sidered. However, in previous investigations using a pneumatic atomizer and an airless
gun (Ye and Pulli, 2010; Ye et al., 2013), it was already found that appropriate initial
droplet conditions necessary for the simulation of the liquid phase can in fact be de-
termined. For the case of pneumatic air spray guns (Ye and Pulli, 2010), injection data
obtained at these positions can be used as input conditions for the calculation of more
complex target geometries and arbitrary alignments of the atomizer without any restric-
tions. Based on this experience, the droplet injection data were applied to a small rect-
angular region of 8 × 2 mm2 , that is, the projection area of the effective orifice surface,
at a distance of 2 mm from the nozzle.

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Spray Coating Using Air-Assisted High-Pressure Atomizers 651

As droplet size distributions, the integral distributions observed under airless and air-
assisted conditions, as shown in Fig. 6, were applied. The axial and the radial velocities
of the droplets as well as the droplet flux distribution in the injection region were adapted
to match the results of the LDA measurements at an axial distance of 50 mm.
The effect of turbulent dispersion on the particle motion was taken into account by
using a stochastic tracking model. The two-way coupling for the momentum exchange
between the two phases was applied, which is quite important in the present numerical
simulation.

3.2 Simulation Results

Spray painting simulation was at first carried out under the airless condition, that is,
without additional air flow in the atomizer. The booth air velocity of 0.3 m/s was used as
the velocity inlet boundary condition in the computational domain. As initial injection
conditions, a spray angle of 80°, which is identical to the spray angle specified by the
manufacturer of the nozzle, and the droplet axial velocity of 150 m/s were applied ac-
cording to the result of the downstream LDA measurements. The resulting air velocity
contours in a cross section at x = 0 are depicted in Fig. 8. Velocity contours larger than
30 m/s are suppressed to increase the resolution of the velocity contours downstream
(in Figs. 12 and 14, a similar treatment was applied by the authors). Higher air velocity,
about 90 m/s in this case, can be observed in the spray jet center due to a significant
momentum exchange between the liquid and the air phase, especially in the region quite
close to the nozzle.
The static wet film growth rate on the target for airless conditions is shown in Fig. 9.
By artificially moving this spray pattern along the x-direction, taking into consideration
the robot velocity as well as wet and dry density of the paint material, the dry film

FIG. 8: Air velocity contours (m/s) in cross section x = 0 (airless gun).

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652 Ye et al.

FIG. 9: Calculated static film growth rate on the target (µm/s) (airless gun).

thickness distribution on the target was calculated and compared with the experimental
results, as shown in Fig. 10. A quite good agreement between experiment and simulation
can be observed.
The validated initial injection conditions, for instance, spray angle, droplet velocity,
and liquid flux distribution, were then applied for the spray painting simulation under
the air-assist case with the assist atomizing air flow rate 114 l/min, shaping air flow rate

FIG. 10: Comparison of calculated and measured dynamic film thickness distributions
(airless).

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Spray Coating Using Air-Assisted High-Pressure Atomizers 653

13.9 l/min, and pressure supply 160 bar for liquid. The corresponding integral droplet
size distribution was used. Figure 11 shows the velocity contours close to the atomizer.
Significantly higher air velocities due to the assist air nozzles [Fig. 11(a)] can be ob-
served. The velocities in the shaping air nozzles [Fig. 11(b)] are relatively low, therefore
the flat jet can be still kept. Air velocity contours in a cross section at x = 0 are shown
in Fig. 12. Owing to the additional air flow rate from the atomizer, the spray jet is nar-
rower than that from the airless model, and bimodal velocity contours can be seen. The
simulated dynamic film thickness distribution on the flat panel based on the calculated
static spray pattern is compared with the corresponding experimental results, as shown
in Fig. 13. Again, a reasonably good agreement between experiment and simulation can
be observed. The measured and simulated spray transfer efficiencies were 88% and 86%,
respectively, for the airless gun, and 78% and 77% for the air-assisted gun. Clearly the
transfer efficiency decreases with increasing assist air flow.
By increasing the shaping air flow rate, for example, to 86 l/min, a narrow spray jet
was obtained as shown in Fig. 14. It was found that there were no significant differences
in the droplet size distribution. Therefore, the integral droplet size distribution for the air-
assisted system, as shown in Fig. 6, could be still used. However, in this case, a smaller
injection region with a size of 4 × 2 mm² close to the liquid nozzle has to be applied.
Figure 15 shows the comparison of calculated and measured dynamic film thickness
distributions.

4. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

In this article, experimental and numerical investigations of the spray coating process us-
ing an air-assisted gun have been presented. The atomization processes under airless and

(a) (b)
FIG. 11: Velocity contours (m/s) near the nozzle (air-assisted gun): (a) in cross section
y = 0; (b) in cross section x = 0.

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654 Ye et al.

FIG. 12: Velocity contours in cross section x = 0 (air-assisted gun).

FIG. 13: Comparison of calculated and measured dynamic film thickness distributions
(air-assisted gun).

air-assist conditions have been experimentally studied by measuring the droplet integral
velocity using LDA and by determining the droplet size distributions using a Spraytec
Fraunhofer-type particle sizer. It was found that the effect of additional atomizing air on
the droplet size distribution is diminishing with increasing liquid pressures. Based on the
Malvern and the LDA results, the representative integral droplet size distributions were
derived.
Based on the experimental results, an injection model for calculating initial condi-
tions of the droplet trajectory simulation was created. Spray painting calculations under

Atomization and Sprays

Spray Coating Using Air-Assisted High-Pressure Atomizers 655

FIG. 14: Velocity contours in cross section x = 0 (air-assisted gun: shaping air flow 86
l/min, assist atomizing air flow 94 l/min). (left) Velocity contours (m/s) near nozzles.

FIG. 15: Comparison of calculated and measured dynamic film thickness distributions
(air-assisted gun: shaping air flow 86 l/min, assist atomizing air flow 94 l/min).

airless and air-assist conditions, aiming to predict the film thickness distributions, were
then carried out with obtained injection data. Model assessment was performed by com-
paring measured and simulated film thickness distributions for flat targets.
Based on the present numerical results, further parameter studies will be carried out,
aiming to do the following:

1. Optimize the performance of both airless and air assist atomizers by rearranging
the geometry of the nozzles and further optimizing the air flow rate in the shaping

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656 Ye et al.
View publication stats

air nozzles, especially with respect to specific requirements on the droplet size dis-
tributions and the film thickness distributions on the targets. In the wide range of
industrial uses (e.g., ships or windmill-powered plants) of airless and air-assisted
paint application, this approach will lead to a systematic and scientific optimiza-
tion in respect of paint consumption and film homogeneity.

2. Calculate paint film thicknesses on complex target geometries, for example, to

speed up the initial programming in automated painting systems.

Of course, the chosen approach to combine full region air flow simulations from the noz-
zle exit up to the target with experimentally obtained initial conditions for the droplet
size distributions and the droplet velocities near the nozzle represents only a compro-
mise. However, it appears to be the only existing problem solution as long as the pri-
mary phase of liquid disintegration and droplet formation cannot be simulated. Making
the situation even worse, phase Doppler anemometry, yielding combined droplet size
and velocity data, cannot be applied due to the optical properties of the used real paint
materials.

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Atomization and Sprays