Show Time! - PCI's coverage of the American Coatings Show

This April issue of PCI is hot off the press for the American Coatings Show and Conference in Atlanta. Like all companies attending this event, we have been preparing for months – launching our ACS microsite (www.pcimag.com/americancoatingsshow), tweeting and posting to Facebook, and sending out eBlasts to notify the industry of all of the great products that will be featured at the show this year.

We have also carefully selected great editorial features to include in this show issue. Several of these features introduce truly new technology, including a new biocidal active from Dow Microbial Control, which is set to be registered with the U.S. EPA in 2014. Orion introduces new carbon black pigments for a changing coatings market, and Part 1 of a two-part article from Dow Coating Materials presents a new equation for optimized applied hiding that combines intrinsic hiding with the rheology and application contribution.

We also are featuring an article from MCTech on definitions and opportunities for smart coatings. I recently spent some time at the Smart Coatings symposium in Orlando and continue to be inspired by the research that is being done in this field. This annual event began in 2005, and aims to provide a forum to stimulate new ideas, present and discuss fundamental and applied science of smart materials, identify critical problems, provide promising solutions, and assess possible roadmaps.

According to Smart Coatings Organizer and Chair, Jamil Baghdachi, this year’s event, which had approximately 150 attendees, saw an attendee return rate of about 19%, which tells him that past attendees know that they will learn something new at each Smart Coatings event. Baghdachi has worked hard to raise the level and quality of the conference. This year’s symposium saw an impressive line-up of speakers from 26 universities from around the world, the Naval Research Laboratory and several global companies.

 Smart coatings are also the topic of one of the sessions at this year’s American Coatings Conference. Other sessions include Biobased Coatings, Measuring and Testing, Pigments, Architectural Coatings, Polyurethanes, Protective Coatings, Novel Materials, Radiation Curing, Waterborne Coatings, Epoxy Coatings, and Nanotechnology. I look forward to attending as many of these sessions as possible, however I am most eager to meet with industry professionals on the show floor. Events like this re-energize my enthusiasm and interest in this industry because I can see the technology up close. Please be sure to stop by PCI’s booth #242 to share your technology and let us know how PCI can help you do your job better!