Covestro will be able to test tens of thousands of formulations with its crosslinkers and binders per year.
The producers of coatings and adhesives are under pressure, because they have to compete for market share, increase the quality in rapid succession and focus on efficiency while ensuring sustainability and regulatory compliance. The international specialty chemicals manufacturer Covestro has then recently announced that it will open a new automated laboratory specifically developed to optimise coatings and adhesives formulations and thus provide even better support to its customers.
More specifically, the new laboratory will test formulations with Covestro binders and crosslinkers, in order to ensures properties such as hardness, adhesion, opacity, gloss and durability. Such formulations typically consist of seven to fifteen components, whose combination determines the properties of the final product. The resulting high number of possible combinations means that standard formulations are usually used. However, the new laboratory will enable more extensive test series, also thanks to the computer-aided design of test series and automation.
“Our new automated laboratory gives us more possibilities for testing formulations. It relieves our specialised laboratories of their standard tasks and can analyse samples more systematically, allowing us to focus our expertise and experience even more on customer-specific topics or try approaches we could not have implemented otherwise,” has stated Martin Merkens, the head of market development for the Coatings and Adhesives business entity of Covestro. “It will then particularly help us in the area of circular economy: alternative raw materials, for example bio-based or recycled materials, can be tested faster and evaluated for their properties in the final product.”
The new facility will be always in operation, performing tens of thousands of tests annually and setting a new standard in terms of number, variety, precision and speed. Moreover, the automated laboratory will generate a large amount of structured data that, combined with measurement data from existing studies, will be evaluated using special machine learning algorithms to further improve formulations. In addition, it will also use artificial intelligence to predict new experiments based on property goals and simultaneously verify them – creating a self-learning system. The comprehension of the possibilities and influencing factors will thus increase rapidly.
“With our automated laboratory, we can work together with our customers on the future of coatings and adhesives. Because it operates almost completely autonomously and learns from our existing knowledge and database as well as newly generated data, it makes the process of optimising and developing formulations many times more efficient and precise,” has stated Thomas Büsgen, the head of the laboratory. “So, it allows us to optimise existing formulations faster or even develop completely new formulations for and together with our customers. We are reaching a new level of modern research.”