At Stand 1-246, Emerald is featuring innovative performance materials for tougher, more durable coatings, including solutions that optimize performance features that are typically considered challenging to balance within formulations.

For example, Emerald Kalama Chemical recently completed a five-year study on exterior weathering of architectural coatings. New data is presented at Emerald's booth showing that K-FLEX^® coalescents actually match the weathering of high-VOC coalescents such as TMPDMB while reducing VOCs. This challenges some typical perceptions that lowering VOCs comes at the expense of performance. In addition, data is shown that demonstrates how K-FLEX coalescents improve other critical properties, such as gloss, scrub resistance and toughness, providing an overall balance of desirable properties coupled with ultra-low-VOCs.

While dibenzoates are a trusted choice for low-VOC and performance in architectural coatings, more and more formulators are also incorporating them in industrial coatings applications due to their excellent permanence in the coating film, which benefits properties such as corrosion resistance. Further, Emerald is featuring data that demonstrates improved film hardness compared to a high-VOC coalescent in direct-to-metal applications.

Emerald's CVC Thermoset Specialties group is featuring a wide range of solutions for challenging environments such as industrial, protective, marine and powder coatings. For example, Hypro^® carboxyl-terminated polymers (CTBN) enhance impact resistance, flexibility, and corrosion resistance in powder coatings. Hypro CTBNs are also used to modify HyPox^® RM22 and RM20 to improve cathodic disbondment and low-temperature properties, interlaminar and peel adhesion, resilience and thermal cycling. Together, these technologies are increasingly used to bring key characteristics to growing applications such as pipeline coatings, where it is imperative to extend the life of the coating and prevent failure.

The CVC group is also featuring safer or more environmentally friendly solutions for industrial coatings, including solutions for high-solids formulations and a line of ERISYS^® epoxy-functional reactive modifiers based on biorenewable content for a reduced carbon footprint. ERISYS GA-240 is a featured solution, as it is being increasingly implemented as a drop-in crosslinker replacement for mutagenic polyfunctional aziridine (PFAZ). In addition to being a safer alternative to PFAZ, ERISYS GA-240 is often more economical since it does not need to be re-inoculated due to hydrolysis.