Room B Seminars

The coatings industry continues to face ever-increasing legislative pressure, driven by concerns surrounding health, the environment, and product safety.  While well-intended and usually necessary, it can have unintended consequences and restrict long-established products, introducing novel challenges for formulators.  Recent case studies include microplastics in seed coatings, biocide labelling, Titanium dioxide classification, and PFAS.  This fast-paced regulatory landscape requires inventive formulating to deliver solutions and high-quality products to customers.  The industry constantly evolves and roles surrounding regulation are more critical than ever.  This evolution also means that there is an increasing requirement for collaborations between industry and academia to negotiate these regulatory constraints. This paper aims to highlight formulating challenges using recent examples driven by regulatory changes.

Consistent colour delivery in coatings plays a critical role in customer satisfaction, perceived quality, production efficiency, and overall brand strength. Robust colour management practices enable paint and coatings manufacturers to achieve reliable colour consistency across all touchpoints, improving efficiency, fostering customer confidence and cohesion in brand representation. This presentation examines approaches to standardizing colour throughout the entire value chain—from manufacturing and quality control to digital channels such as e-commerce—and highlights practical methods for facilitating effective, end-to-end colour management.

Lubrizol keeps developing products that meet our customers’ performance and sustainability goals. This presentation highlights the recent Lubrizol developments focusing on oil modified water-based acrylics and polyurethane dispersions. This novel chemistry enables formulations with high renewable content with exceptional properties while addressing environmental concerns.
Lubrizol has explored the oil modified chemistry to improve film-forming capabilities at low temperatures, application advantages and exterior durability.
The evaluation and characterization of oil modified acrylics has proved superior overall performance compared to conventional coatings.
The presentation will also elaborate on ongoing developments on oil modified polyurethane dispersion to enhance performance and sustainability.

The use of silane modified colloidal silica in PUD resin-based coating formulations in combination with resin and epoxy silane has been investigated. The samples were evaluated regarding their mechanical, physical properties and corrosion resistances on galvanized steel.

Addition of modified colloidal silica enhanced the corrosion resistance significantly. The coating cross-linking density increased upon silica and silane addition. Synergy between silane, colloidal silica and resin in corrosion resistance could be noted but did not correlate to any further increase in cross-linking density.

A good compatibility was observed, hardness of the coatings were in agreement with their good flexibility and impact resistance.

I will be discussing my research on a new polymer system (patent filed) that we are developing that replaced petrochemical content with biosourced components from non-food sources. This polymer is the results of over 4 years of R&D. It has been trialled in a number of real-life applications including emulsion paints, plastic films and a coating for a new type of water filter which has been trialled by Northumbrian Water in a pilot plant at one of their sewage works.