Focus on Coatings R&D-New Research Methods Creating Possibilities

By Cynthia Challener

For well over 100 years, innovation has enabled the paint and coatings in­dustry to offer novel products for new substrates, ever better products with improved performance, and products with reduced environmental impact. Despite the gains made in this time, significant gaps in knowledge and un­derstanding remain.

Research approaches such as design of experiment (DOE), high throughput experimentation (HTE), combinatorial methods (Combi), and data mining (DM) now being applied to coatings R&D aim to fill those gaps and may lead to many new opportunities for the industry. All of these methods have been around for many years. DOE was first in­troduced in the early 1900s for factorial designs.

Mixture designs for study­ing formulations were developed in the 1950s. The pharmaceutical industry has utilized combinatorial chemistry and HTE in conjunction with DOE and DM for the development of novel drugs over the past 15 years or so. It has been only recently, though, that scientists and engineers in the paint and coatings industry have begun exploring the application of these research methods to the process, ingredient, and formulations development for paints and coatings.