Hey PC cooking fans, it’s time to lace up your aprons and roll up your sleeves. Today’s powder coating cooking lesson revolves around fillers, aka, extender pigments. Much like pasta, these raw materials are the unsung heroes of a powder coating formula. Although relatively low in cost, your choice of pasta can make or break a tasty dish. Similarly your choice of filler is critical to a coating’s performance.
Fillers, just like pasta, are used to extend the formula or dish, establishing that fine balance between the performance of a coating and the overall cost of the formula. Important features such as type, shape and size of the noodles influence your choice of pasta. The same goes for fillers. Powder formulators have a wide range of fillers or extender types to choose from, based on their chemistry (Table 1). In addition, the size and particle shape of a filler greatly affects its performance.