In the United States, there are approximately 700 million gallons of house paint sold each year. Since the 1940s, the amount of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC) in architectural paints has declined dramatically. The first step change occurred in the 1950s, with the advent of the first waterborne polymers which enabled architectural paints with only 400 g/L VOC compared to typical solvent borne paints with over 700g/L VOC. Today, it is not uncommon to see architectural paints with less than 5 g/L VOC content.<br/>The demand for water-based, “near 0” VOC architectural paints with low odor has been driven by both environmental groups and health conscious consumers, with the expectation that all other performance properties would remain unchanged.<br/>Traditionally, volatile coalescents were added to waterborne coatings to improve a number of properties including film formation. As paint companies began to reduce volatile coalescent levels in their formulations, polymer suppliers responded by adjusting polymer Tg and/or incorporating ambient cure chemistry, surfactants and other (often water soluble) additives to retain (and hopefully improve) film formation performance.<br/>Unfortunately, due to higher exudation of water soluble materials in these films, these changes have created new performance challenges, such as, leaching of surfactants and color rub off.<br/>A number of analytical tools including NMR, SEM, TOF-SIMS and LC techniques have been applied to understand these issues. Data generated from these investigations and possible mechanisms will be discussed.

Measurement and control of migrating species on waterborne coatings surfaces

253rd National Meeting (2017)

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.