Emerald Performance Materials’ booth theme this year is “Providing the Brightest Chemistry for Coatings.” According to Julie Vaughn Biege, Corporate Marketing VP, “The ACS provides an excellent venue for us as innovators to make an impression on the industry, showcase the full range of our company’s capabilities and highlight our latest developments. Our company continues to grow and develop new solutions to bring value to the coatings industry, and we have continued to expand our presence at the ACS in recent years. In fact, since the last ACS, we have completed about a half-dozen expansions, patent applications and new products for the coatings industry across the company, so we have a lot of new areas of development to highlight at both the exhibition and at the conference.”

Booth 521 will feature some of Emerald’s investments and product developments, including low-VOC coalescents, defoamers, reactive liquid polymers and an expanded range of zero-VOC and UV-curabledispersions, as well as a full range of specialty resins and additives designed to address formulating challenges in the coatings industry.

“Coalescents are an additive that can deliver much more to coatings than just aid in film formation,” said Shamsi P. Gravel, K-Flex product line Director for the Americas. “The K-Flex^® line of non-phthalate plasticizers and coalescents grew in 2013, building upon the successes of K-Flex 975P and K-Flex 850S, adding new products such as K-Flex 500P, a low-VOC product. These new products are ideal for use in architectural coatings where excellent gloss, scrub, block and freeze-thaw characteristics are desired.”

Emerald’s CVC Thermoset Specialties business focuses on specialty epoxy resins and reactive modifiers for the most challenging applications where superior solvent resistance and impact/chip/crack resistance are needed. “Our newest Hypro™ reactive liquid polymers (RLPs), including methacrylate-functional copolymers of butadiene and acrylonitrile, are designed to improve toughness, impact resistance, flexibility and adhesion at low temperatures in coatings and adhesives,” said Jeff Tyrrell, RLP Product Manager. “We have also enhanced other important characteristics - expanded the shelf life and processing window of these new materials.”

In addition to highlighting the company’s brightest colors – its durable/light-fast LUCIDA COLORS^® energy-curable products and VERDIS^® zero-VOC line of dispersions and Trans-Oxides^® – the Emerald Specialties business group is introducing FOAM BLAST^® 4213, the latest in its expanding line of organo-modified silicone technology. The new ultra-low-VOC product provides superior foam control, knockdown and persistence in today’s more challenging low- and zero-VOC formulations and in energy-cured systems.

Emerald will be delivering two papers at the conference, highlighting some of the latest technical developments covering new coalescents and silicone technology. “Novel Modified Silicone Fluids for Architectural and Specialty Coatings” will be presented today at 4:00 p.m. by Thomas Penny, Technical Product Manager. Penny will discuss how silicone additives such as the patent-pending Silmera™ line are used to provide value-added properties to coatings, including ease of use, slip/mar resistance, block resistance, foam control and other key characteristics.

“Innovation in Benzoate Technology for Coatings Applications,” will be presented tomorrow (April 9) at 11:30 a.m. by Bill Arendt, Research Fellow. This presentation will cover the development of coatings utilizing K-Flex benzoate coalescents, which meet an industry need for low-VOC additives that not only meet the performance benchmarks of other traditional high-VOC benchmarks and newer low-VOC alternatives, but in many cases improve upon them. The presentation will focus on improved performance in interior and exterior architectural paint with K-Flex coalescents, including scrub resistance, gloss and blocking.