Coatings World - July 2012

Reactive Surfaces opens first functional
coatings manufacturing facility

Reactive Surfaces of Austin, Texas will open the doors of its new coatings manufacturing plant in Hattiesburg, Mississippi starting July 2012. The company will maintain its corporate headquarters in Austin, and continue to build its bio-based additives elsewhere, but it will expand the manufacturing capacity of the company to include coatings with the new plant. The first of these functional coatings will be clear over coats for military vehicles containing its OPDtox self-decontaminating enzymatic additives.

both the functional additives and the functional coatings businesses.

The new facility will be housed at the University of Southern Mississippi’s (USM) newly-constructed 60,000 square-foot Accelerator. The new facility will provide the company with the ability to accelerate the reduction to practice of its novel functional additives into coating systems specifically designed to take advantage of the unique capability of such additives to produce functional surfaces.

Coatings functionalized with OPDtox
have been tested with actual chemical
enter military operations, and to maxi-
mize safety for the war fighter. The over-
coats will provide a stable, long-term
decontamination capability without any
impact on the performance of the under-
lying vehicle coating.”

Reactive Surfaces has set up a functional coatings manufacturing facility at the University of Southern Mississippi's new 60,000 square-foot Accelerator.

“We have decided to expand our self-
decontamination functional additives of-
ferings to include military coatings
incorporating these additives,” said Reac-
tive Surfaces founder and CIO, Steve Mc-
Daniel. “We intend to extract greater
value from this highly-profitable business
with the dual offerings, and to make them
immediately available to military cus-
tomers for testing and adoption. We ex-
pect this endeavor to be successful, and to
be followed by our other bio-based addi-
tives being placed into functional coatings
directly available to the end consumer.”
The company is now operational in
agents and found to add a significant capa-
bility to standard military vehicle coatings.

Henkel opens German
competence center for coatings

Having to replace parts of industrial equipment is a very costly and time-consuming matter. These costs and the lost time can, however, be reduced by repairing, maintaining and protecting the parts. In its newly opened Competence Center for Coatings in Garching, Germany, Henkel offers training courses in which employees of engineering companies can get to know Henkel’s advanced surface engineering solutions and enhance their skills in applying them.

Henkel provides a broad range of maintenance, repair and overhaul products based on two-component epoxy resins. Damaged pump parts can, for example, be remodeled using metal-filled compounds from Loctite and so provided with durable protection against corrosion and wear. Conveyor screws can be coated with a sprayable corrosion protection and wear-resistant “shield”, and ball mills provided with a chemical and impact resistant layer. Customers can thus enhance the reliability and safety of their equipment, while saving on the time and costs associated with downtimes and procurement and installation of machine parts.

The newly opened Competence Center for Coatings in Garching (near Munich) in Germany has a 150 square-meter workshop. It includes a blasting cabinet, a washing station and a number of work-places for manual application with spatulas and brushes through to advanced spraying techniques. Henkel collaborates closely with partners such as SafetyKleen and Walther Pilot.