Waterborne coatings gain acceptance

“The increasingly stringent environmental legislation in recent years has further accelerated the technology shift from solventborne to waterborne coatings,” confirmed Dr. Torsten Pohl of the Coatings, Adhesives and Sealants Business Unit of Bayer MaterialScience, the company within the Bayer Group that is the direct heir to PUR pioneer Otto Bayer. “Waterborne coatings formulated with our raw materials can be used today for the coating of nearly any and all industrial and consumer products, and compare favorably to solventborne coatings in every regard. Their properties are often even superior to those of their solventborne counterparts.”
Take the newly developed product Artwalk®, for example. The decorative and highly functional PUR floor coating is formulated with the raw materials Desmophen®, Desmodur®, Bayhydrol® and Bayhydur® from Bayer MaterialScience, and forms a durable, scratch-proof seal over even the most intricate floor paintings or other design elements. When combined with aliphatic binder systems, the floor covering will not yellow. Artwalk® is also a time-saver for indoor applications – the waterborne coating is astonishingly fast drying, allowing interior finishing work to resume quickly.

Entirely new challenges

“It is only in the last four or five years that environment-friendly and high-performance PUR coating systems have been used for flooring. As a supplier of coating raw materials, we find this to be a very attractive market segment, not least with regard to the Asian growth region,” added Dr. Thomas Stingl, an Artwalk® expert at Bayer MaterialScience. “Our products are faced with new challenges arising from the changing climatic conditions in the construction sector and the required chemical resistance to wind and weather effects.” In light of the new generation of products developing here, Bayer MaterialScience has established a department dedicated to innovative coating applications for PUR raw materials.
“In addition to the construction industry, the wood and furniture industry, textile and shoe manufacturers, and especially the automobile industry remain among the most important users of waterborne coating systems formulated with our polyisocyanates and PUR dispersions, as we do not actually supply finished coatings, but rather their starting materials and technical support for their use. This allows for very efficient development management by our customers,” said Dr. Markus Mechtel, a chemist and coatings specialist for automotive clearcoats at Bayer MaterialScience.