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US 6,605,320 B2Granted
Streak-reducing coating device and method
Assignee3M Innovative Properties Company
InventorYuko Yoshida
Life of this patent
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Assignee3M Innovative Properties Company
InventorYuko Yoshida
Estimating the term…
A coating device for carrying out a die coating method, which is capable of rapidly and assuredly eliminating an undesirable streak occurring in a coating layer during the coating operation. The coating device includes a coating head spaced from a back-up roll, and a shifting mechanism for shifting the coating head close to and remote from the back-up roll. The shifting mechanism includes a reciprocation carriage mounted onto a stationary frame to be linearly reciprocatedly movable thereon, a drive section for reciprocating the reciprocation carriage on the stationary frame, and a stop section for selectively hindering the linear motion of the reciprocation carriage caused by the drive section at a desired position. The shifting mechanism operates to instantaneously reciprocate the coating head at a small distance so that a distance between the outer surface of the back-up roll now carrying out the coating operation and the coating face of the coating head temporarily increases.
A method for coating a web comprising:
A coating device comprising a back-up roll carrying on an outer surface thereof a moving base web material and rotating therewith, a coating head spaced from said back-up roll and including a coating face opposed to said outer surface of said back-up roll, a coating material being continuously supplied onto said coating face, a shifting mechanism for shifting said coating head relative to said back-up roll, and a sensor for detecting a streak in the coating material, wherein the coating material is supplied between the base web material carried on said outer surface of said back-up roll and said coating face of said coating head so that a coating layer with a predetermined thickness is continuously formed on a surface of the moving base web material, wherein said shifting mechanism can reciprocally shift said coating head after the sensor has detected a streak in the coating material to temporarily change a distance between said outer surface of said back-up roll and said coating face of said coating head during a coating operation so as to reduce streaking in the coating layer.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.