Clariant, a focused and innovative specialty chemical company, today announced it will contribute more sustainability, safety, and even brighten up the urban landscape through new solutions to the building and construction industry's challenges.
Clariant's coatings-related innovations for the segment's applications embrace the ethos of "every little bit helps". They offer pigment paste producers and coatings formulators to the final coating user support for their part in creating more sustainable, attractive city environments capable of handling rapid global urbanisation. Be that helping the bold paint of a gigantic construction vehicle to be made more efficiently and with less resource use, keeping brightly painted buildings looking great after just one coat, or enabling architects to safely bring the natural, sustainable merits of wood to inspiring new high-rises and concert halls.
Wood, billed as 'the new concrete'1 by some, is becoming more mainstream outside and inside public buildings, and city commercial and residential premises. Whether used as engineered wood for a new building structure, as façade cladding, green space fencing, or inside a historical theatre, preserving its qualities and appeal poses unique protection and safety challenges.
Two innovative solutions from Clariant get to the heart of the matter. With non-halogenated flame retardant Exolit® 855, coatings manufacturers gain the opportunity to create truly transparent fire- and (in combination with a transparent top coat) water-resistant intumescent coatings for all kinds of wood types, which allow the brilliance of both light and dark woods to shine through. Exolit 855 can be used in environments with strict flammability requirements, such as public buildings, buying critical evacuation time for occupants in the event of a fire. It is completely clear and easy to formulate and apply.
For retaining the appearance and quality of exterior woods over the long-term, new Hostavin® 3315 DISP adds the benefit of sustainable, label-free UVA protection to waterborne clearcoats and paint systems. The UV absorber has excellent photo-permanence and also high resistance to migration which helps keep cladding or fencing, for example, in top condition whatever the weather.
When used together with Clariant's Hostavin 3070 DISP hindered amine light stabilizer (HALS), the benefits of a clearcoat last even longer. Both products carry Clariant's EcoTain® label in recognition of their sustainability benefits.
Staying with sustainable innovation for outdoors, Clariant brings efficiency and aesthetics to the fore for its customers with an advance that helps wave goodbye to unsightly snail trails on painted exteriors, and cuts production time of the pigment pastes used in the paints too.
Launched at the European Coatings Show 2019, Clariant's new Dispersogen® PLF 100 is an innovative low-foaming polymer dispersing agent that helps to improve efficiency for paste producers, even when using hard-to-disperse red pigment concentrates. Finished pastes have powerful colour strength for "wow" factor bold façade paints that brighten up a city. Plus, its low-foaming qualities carry over to application too. Less microfoam is created during the painting process, rendering painted surfaces smoother. Moreover, the additive helps pigment pastes maintain their original viscosity levels while in storage for up to two years. Dispersogen PLF 100 stays in a paint without leaching should the paint be exposed to humidity before it dries. This means no snail trails on coloured paints, meaning no time or expense needed for repeat coats to cover them up.
Sustainability benefits can be felt behind-the-scenes of construction sites too. Clariant's non-halogenated flame retardant Exolit AP 435 for water-based intumescent coatings for steel, ensures that such coatings maintain easy application even in cold environments and after long storage. Clariant's well-known ammonium polyphosphate, which carries the Clariant EcoTain label, overcomes a previously known hurdle for long-term applicability of intumescent coatings.
The same is true when it comes to ensuring safer and more effective fire protection of fully exposed steel constructions, like airports or cinemas, subject to high-humidity climates. New non-halogenated flame retardant Exolit AP 468 (TP) for intumescent solvent-based coatings used in demanding conditions reduces the possibility for the coating's fire resistance performance to be affected by the formation of water-related blisters.
Even the paints used on the construction vehicles - an integral feature of today's urban landscape - are making their mark in sustainable cities. The mass production of high volume, high intensity color shades requires complex dispersing by the paint maker to achieve the perfect full color tone for high performance coatings. It is normally a time-consuming and also costly process in terms of environmental impact, production time and cleaning efforts.
Clariant's next-generation pigments not only pack a punch in terms of high color brilliance, they can simplify the process of co-dispersing even further in a high speed disolver making bead milling potentially obsolete. This improves eco-efficiency and flexibility when creating, for example, intense opaque yellow shades for mass volume paints. Production time is cut by ca. 85%, energy consumption reduced by up to 90%, significantly less polluted wastewater is created, less cleaning is required, and a potential of 30% in cost savings is feasible.
The next generation pigments (formerly ED Pigments) made an impact on the market over the last years. The whole colour circle from yellow to red, blue and green can be covered, and Clariant's proprietary technology has now reached a level of maturity that these pigments are now integrated into the regular product portfolio and will use Clariant's standard pigment nomenclature.
Achim Hennemann, Segment Manager Coatings, Flame Retardants, Clariant comments: "While the impact of every innovation for building and construction-related applications is not always apparent at the consumer level, providing our coatings industry customers with easy-to-use ingredients that boost efficiency, lower resource use and enable them to introduce more environmentally-compatible, effective and safer products, benefits everyone in the long-term creation of more sustainable, beautiful cities."
//1: Prize-winning architect Alex de Rijke, DRMM Architects, quote taken from: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/jan/28/wood-engineered-timber-housing-needs //