WESEL, Germany – The specialty chemicals company ALTANA presented the ALTANA Innovation Award to a BYK team for a new additive product line. As an international team of the BYK division, Byungdu Bae, Dr. Marc Eberhardt, Mark Heekeren and Dr. Guillaume Jaunky developed a new family of hydrophilic additives based on advanced technologies and, most notably, brought the flagship BYK^®-3560 from the lab to the market. The product series is highly innovative because it offers completely new solutions for recoatability in multilayered systems.

“We are pleased to honor outstanding teamwork and state-of-the-art technology with the ALTANA Innovation Award again this year. Taking a completely new approach, the winners were able to establish an innovative product family of hydrophilic additives on the market. As a result, BYK’s leading position in this segment is further supported,” said Dr. Petra Severit, CTO ALTANA AG.

Various unresolved issues with recoatability were the drivers and motivation for developing new products with new technical solutions. With BYK-3560, the team took a new, innovative path by drastically increasing the surface energy of coatings and thus significantly improving the adhesion of subsequent coats. “We are proud to have secured a further competitive edge for BYK with our innovative additive product series and thus successfully positioned ourselves for the future,” said Dr. Jaunky from the winning BYK team.

The BYK Team prevailed against 14 strong teams from the four ALTANA divisions. The submitted projects were evaluated based on different criteria. The innovative strength of the projects played a role, as well as the economic advantage that the company can gain from the implementation.