Coatings Development – Moving to the Fast Track

By Cynthia Challener

The desire to speed up the product development process has always been present in the coatings marketplace. However, the drivers for reducing time- 10-rnarket have never been as numerous and the pressure as intense as they are today. Many leading formulators and raw material suppliers have discov­ered that high throughput experimentation (HTE) techniques can have a measurable impact on the development process, allowing for not only reduced time in the lab, but often creation of higher performing products.

High throughput technology, also referred to as high throughput screen­ing and sometimes as combinatorial chemistry, has been widely imple­mented in the pharmaceutical industry for many years. Catalyst manufactur­ers have been more recent adopters of HTE techniques. Many specialty, consumer, and commodity chemical companies are now benefiting from ap­plication of the technology as well.

HTE involves the use of robotics to enable parallel screening of very large numbers of micro-sized experiments at the same time, accelerating scientific research. For coatings, the technique can be applied at all stages of the prod­uct development process, including initial formulation, application, and per­formance evaluation.