After about two years of development, Evonik officially launched COATINO(r), the first digital laboratory assistant for paint and coatings formulators.
Evonik's virtual assistant COATINO®, is now available to the entire paint & coatings industry for free. At www.coatino.com, paint and coatings formulators can obtain AI-based additive recommendations for several applications and individual guiding formulations for pigment concentrates. COATINO® can be used from any electronic device and operated by voice control.
To provide a constant upgrade of COATINO®, Evonik operates a high-throughput equipment at its Essen site in Germany that tests and evaluates up to 120 coating formulations every day.
How it works
Formulators can choose from
more than 200 product properties and effects in order to obtain tailor-made and weighted recommendations, which can be dynamically compared with each other so as to better understand the differences and facilitate the decision-making process. The number of theoretical property combinations is 10
70, plus around 1,900 existing guiding formulations. If no guiding formulation exists yet, COATINO® calculates individual formulations for all types of pigment concentrates based on its constantly growing data pool. A total of almost
300 products are available to choose from, including defoamers, dispersing additives, and matting agents. If needed, COATINO® also provides technical, regulatory, and safety data sheets.
"It was and is a great challenge to teach COATINO® the technical language of our industry," explains Gaetano Blanda, head of the Coating Additives Business Line. "The language assistants available today simply do not understand our common technical vocabulary. And they certainly don't have any expertise in coating additives."
"We had to implement both the necessary language processing and additive know-how nearly from scratch", added Oliver Kröhl, project manager of the COATINO® development team.
The future of COATINO®
COATINO® was developed by Evonik in cooperation with a leading German supplier of Big Data and AI solutions and both companies are working to continuously expand the tool with new functions and even more comprehensive formulation calculations.
Evonik is currently researching its own smart speaker so that formulators worldwide can access the digital assistant even more flexibly in the future.