Paper and plastic foils (PET, PP,…) are materials that are used for many kinds of packagings, prints and labels especially in the food and pharmacy packaging industry where special functional properties are needed like recycablility, special barriers for gases or the migration of the ink or fluids to avoid for plastic packagings problems with oxygen or water steam and for paper packagings problems with fat, fluids, water and also gases.

Therefore more and more often papers and foils are coated or laminated to create these special functional properties. The most common method to apply the coating is a water or alcohol based solvant bath where a gravur roll transport and distributes the coating on the web or the application of the coating via a slit nozzle.

IR can be used for water based solvants for the complete drying process while it is better to combine an IR booster with an ex proven hot air drying tunnel for alcohol based solvents to avoid safety risks and critical explosion concentrations. Here the IR is used to increase the temperature of the web only from room temperature to the evaporation point where the web travels into the air dyring tunnel where ex risks are elminated by low concentrations of the alcoholic components.