Episode 351 - How Near Infrared Photons Transform Industrial Drying, With Kai Bär, Managing Director, adphos
Hot air drying has powered print and coating lines for decades, but it comes with a familiar trade-off: you heat the whole substrate, spend energy you do not really need to spend, and still fight limitations on speed and material choice. We sit down with Dr Kai Bär, Managing Director, President, and Owner of adphos, to get practical about an alternative: high-power photonic drying using near infrared energy that targets the liquid layer and absorbs where it matters most.
Kai explains the core difference in working principle between conventional thermal drying and photonic processes, including the often-misunderstood point that “photonic” does not mean zero heat, it means better control of where heat is created and how it moves. We talk about why that matters for digital inkjet printing, coatings, labels, and especially packaging, where water-based inks on plastics and flexible packaging can be constrained by temperature sensitivity, solvent concerns, and cases where UV curing is a no-go for food or skin-contact applications.
We also zoom out to the wider industrial picture: coil coating, paper manufacturing with high liquid removal, thermal forming, and emerging projects in printed electronics, solar cells, ultra-fast particle processing, and even lithium battery manufacturing. Finally, we tackle the cost question head-on, focusing on process cost, automation, reproducibility, and ROI rather than judging the technology by equipment price alone. If you find this useful, subscribe, share it with a colleague working on production upgrades, and leave a review with the one drying bottleneck you most want to solve.
