Waterborne Coatings

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Bio-surfactants are a promising alternative to chemical surfactants in the development of eco-friendly and high-performance coatings due to their bio-degradability, low toxicity, renewable feedstocks, and enhanced performance in various aspects of coatings formulations.

This study comprehensively evaluated novel, ultra-low-VOC 1K and 2K waterborne floor-coating systems designed to provide eco-friendly, lower-VOC alternatives to traditional solvent-based coatings. The materials employed in these innovative systems showed remarkable performance when subjected to industry-standard tests.

The new technology is a waterborne wood coating that can be applied across a wide spectrum of environmental conditions, without the productivity-sapping performance trade-offs commonly associated with waterborne coatings.

This month’s Formulating with Mike column continues the discussion on resins, with a focus on epoxy curing agents. When it comes to great adhesion, chemical resistance, and corrosion resistance, an epoxy is hard to beat. There are different epoxy curing agents, and each one provides different properties that can be suited for a wide variety of end-use applications. 

This month’s Formulating with Mike column continues the focus on resins. Mike tests paints with APE-containing and APE-free emulsions for stability, particle size, and final paint quality.

This month’s Formulating with Mike column continues the focus on resins, and discusses acrylic emulsion polymerization, in particular, surfactant design and how it affects the polymerization of a vinyl-acrylic emulsion.

Waterborne latexes are produced via emulsion polymerization, in which surfactants or emulsifiers are the key components to control latex properties. Much effort has been made to reduce the impact of surfactants on the performance of waterborne formulations. One of the promising approaches is to use polymerizable or reactive surfactants to prepare latex polymers. 

Many waterborne coating formulations utilize eco-friendly biopolymers, which have beneficial properties such as being biodegradable, and contain much fewer VOCs. Today, there are renewable materials that are worth consideration and greater investigation to further improve sustainability of products at the end of their useful lives; these materials are carbohydrate-based polymers produced from starch.

As the coatings industry continues to prioritize waterborne systems, further research to provide coatings with comparable properties to those based on solvent-based systems is required. This paper, winner of the PCI Award for Technical Excellence at the 2023 Waterborne Symposium, presents a surfactant-free encapsulation process that enables the enclosure of polysiloxanes of arbitrary molecular weight in capsules of nanometer size in a simple, scalable process. 

Increased regulatory scrutiny of lead, chromium, and zinc is driving the migration to heavy-metal-free corrosion inhibitors. In this article, several water-based resin technologies were selected to demonstrate the performance of heavy-metal-free corrosion inhibitors versus their zinc-containing counterparts.