The federal government purchases a huge amount of goods and services, totaling $412 billion in 2006. Manufacturers of biobased products have a unique opportunity to connect with the nation’s largest marketplace – and to generate increased revenue to build their businesses while sustaining the environment and helping the farm economy.
by Steven L.Devlin Jessica A. Riedl MarilynVaughan
The EU’s REACH regulation has a clear message: meet the requirements or you will not be able to produce in, export to, or market within the EU. Is your company able to meet this challenge?
The advantages of using the highest specification grinding media in milling operations are well documented and understood. Higher density provides the potential to increase productivity, often significantly over other traditional ceramic and glass materials. Improved toughness and durability result in extended bead lifetimes and machine maintenance periods.
This is the second in a series of three articles about dirt pickup resistance. Article one, published in PCI, September 2007, outlined trends and identified why dirt pickup resistance is important in the current and emerging markets, specifically in low-VOC formulations, elastomerics and new business construction.
Now that China is part of the global manufacturing scene, it is facing problems that the Western world has had to address for many years. The influx of industrial enterprises, both from national and foreign companies, is replacing the landscape that was previously devoted to farming. The urbanization and industrialization of China has brought not only economic growth and prosperity but also the problems of any modern nation, including pollution from untreated household and industrial waste.
Since the mid-1990s, composite materials have made substantial inroads across the building products industry in the manufacture of windows, doors, trim and siding. The unprecedented strength and resilience of these materials, and their low maintenance, has made them too good to ignore. They also offer another advantage important in today’s building industry: “green” appeal. While they are produced using petrochemicals, composites may be comprised of recycled materials and, therefore, reduce the harvesting of lumber.
One example of the success of composites is in the trim marketplace. Over the past decade, cellular PVC trim boards have emerged to displace wood and capture 10% market share, according to a recent article in Plastics Technology. The article quotes a 2006 study from Principia Partners predicting 13% annual growth for PVC trim board through 2010.
DuPont Chemical Solutions Enterprise announced new fluorotelomer products for repellents and surfactants that deliver maximum performance with a minimal environmental footprint. New DuPont Capstone products are based on short-chain chemistry and provide a step-change reduction in trace impurities below the limit of detection,1 offering customers the same or better performance than their predecessors without a compromise in fluorine efficiency. Capstone products also meet the goals of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency 2010/15 PFOA Stewardship Program and will be registered on global inventories in all countries where they are sold.
A good matte finish is often required in coatings formulations. In order to fully optimize this important parameter, Michelman has recently developed two wax dispersions: Michem® Guard 349 and Michem Guard 350. Both dispersions aid in imparting a matting effect to most aqueous coatings and varnishes, while enhancing other properties such as abrasion resistance and water repellency.
Dow Corning Corporation is a leader in developing new Silicon-Based Technologies (SBTs) that advance the coatings industry and empower formulators to offer new functionality in various applications. In the past 10 years, the number of new patents related to silicon-based materials for coatings has increased exponentially, specifically related to solving the problems traditionally addressed by SBTs, such as foam control, wetting and adhesion promotion.
A new anti-sliding adhesive developed by engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, may be the closest man-made material yet to mimic the remarkable gecko toe hairs that allow the tiny lizard to scamper along vertical surfaces and ceilings.
National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) codes and guidelines highlight safe working practices in hazardous areas, and specifically how to control static electricity, which in many cases is capable of providing the ignition source for a fire or explosion. All of us responsible for, or working in, potentially explosive atmospheres are aware of the fact that we must eliminate all potential sources of ignition, including naked flames, hot surfaces and electrical sparking.
A few years ago the coatings world was ‘nano’ crazy. The term nano was everywhere. I didn’t know what it really meant since there wasn’t an agreed-upon definition of nano. Mostly it meant adding a little of something tiny to paint. It didn’t matter if was a 5-micron particle. If it was small – it was nano. “Sustainability” has replaced nano as the hot topic.
Improving pigment dispersion is a vital aspect of performance in water-based inks and coatings. The elements of dispersing are wetting of pigment agglomerates, separation of the agglomerates into discrete primary particles and maintenance of particle separation once it is achieved. Often, dispersion formulations can possess adequate pigment wetting, but not long-term stability (maintenance of particle separation). This creates problems such as gelling, loss of color, gloss or transparency (or opacity in the case of opaque pigments). The key to attainment of good pigment wetting/processability is to utilize a polymer with chemical moieties that have an affinity for the particle surface. This enhances pigment wetting by the polymer. In addition, the polymer architecture can also be designed so that adequate steric stability is obtained; this provides good long-term dispersion stability by maintaining particle separation.
by Robert B. Adams William R. Dougherty LisaFine DisaGrant
Coatings are mixtures of components with highly diverse properties. In addition to solid particles, the coatings in different solvents contain dissolved or dispersed polymers, polyelectrolytes and surface-active substances in varying quantities. Coatings are highly sophisticated colloidal systems whose complex interactions determine the properties of the coating in its liquid state and in its finished state after application. The requirements for coatings are increasing. It is the customers’ expectations in the end product that set the standards for the coating producers. But to produce high-end products, high-value pigments are needed, and they come at a price. Eventually, the choice of pigments is based on what provides the best possible combination of coloristics, quality and economics.
Dr. Peter-Alexander Wacker, President and CEO of Wacker Chemie, AG, Munich, greeted the International Press March 18, 2008, with news of continued growth. WACKER’s 2007 results were the best in its history.
With the introduction of waterborne acrylic (latex) technology more than 50 years ago, commercial coatings manufacturers found an alternative to traditional solventborne alkyd chemistries that had been the mainstay of the coatings industry until that point in time. Waterborne paint chemistry offered significant advantages to both manufacturers and end users of coatings, including easier clean-up and lower VOC content when compared to solventborne alkyds, which required significant amounts of organic solvent additives during the manufacturing process. However, the switch to waterborne chemistries did not completely eliminate the VOC content of acrylic-based coatings. All acrylics, particularly “gloss” acrylic latex formulations, require the addition of organic solvents to enable coalescence and coating film formation.
by CarlSullivan
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