BATON ROUGE, LA - The Center for the Polyurethanes Industry (CPI) honored Albemarle Corp., Baton Rouge, LA, and LINE-X Protective Coatings, Huntsville, AL, with the 2011 Innovation Award for the development of a new color-stable aliphatic coating technology. The award, which was presented during the 2011 CPI Technical Conference on September 28th, recognizes companies and individuals who bring new products, technologies and initiatives to the marketplace.

The coating utilizes Albemarle's ETHACURE® 90, a new aliphatic curative that considerably improves the processing capability of polyurea spray elastomer coating systems. The new coating technology is UV and color stable, giving customer's color choice without the need for an additional topcoat. The technology provides rapid return to service and is environmentally friendly, generating minimal VOCs.

The effectiveness and durability of this new technology was recently proven as it was used as the protective coating on Dominator 1, a vehicle featured on the 2011 season of Discovery Channel's “Storm Chasers.” The storm chaser vehicle demonstrated excellent resistance to storm damage during the 2011 storm season.

“The protective coating was critical to the safety of the crew of Dominator 1 during a particularly dangerous storm season,” said Reed Timmer, TVN Lead Storm Chaser, Meteorologist. “The coating performed exceptionally well in the field, protecting the vehicle from damage even in storms with softball-sized hail.”

Albemarle chemist Dr. Paul Wiggins was also recognized at the CPI conference; he won Best Presentation Award in the CASE Technical Session for his paper “New Developments in Aliphatic Polyurea Coatings.” The paper was submitted and co-authored by Terry Pe (LINE-X), Thalan Burris (Albemarle), Sam Lane (Albemarle) and Dustin Le (Horn).