With a wide range of pigments, fillers and resin binders used across multiple applications, flooding and floating remain an issue for the coating and ink industries. In this article, we evaluate how silicone additives can be used beyond the traditional benefits, and demonstrate how these additives can bring added performance in titanium dioxide-based formulations to prevent this age-old problem.
Silicones are well known for their surface activity and the benefit this brings to inks and coatings. The versatile architecture of these materials means they can deliver a wide range of properties, such as slip, haptics, wetting and leveling. These silicone materials are typically low molecular weight and non-reactive, in order to ensure they migrate quickly to the ink or coating surface to do their job.