huge potential for the paints and coatings
industry material manufacturers. He said
Covestro’s participation at the EACC was
an opportunity to network with current
and potential customers of the company’s
high-tech polymers and raw materials for
polyurethanes, coatings, adhesives and
specialty chemicals.
“Our products are already in the
East African market and the
event provides an opportunity for us to hear from our
consumers, retailers and other participants,” said Gamal.
During the two-day event,
top professionals and company decision implementers gave presentations that
touched on a wide range of
issues such as the overview
of the African paints and
coatings market, regulatory
issues, latest technology that
is shaping the industry, latest
projects and also upgrading
of existing manufacturing facilities and new ones with capacity to enable competitors
stand out from the crowd.
Daniel Troxler of Switzerland-based
Buhler AG explained to participants how
to achieve high-grade dispersions with
their micro bead processing systems. He
said optimized agitated bead milling can
enable companies in the paints and coat-
ings industry achieve “quality enhance-
ment and energy saving.”
He outlined to the participants how
different bead mill designs and “major
parameters influencing the quality and
required specific energy positively.”
“The most important parameters,
which need to be optimized are the power
density in the mill chamber and the diam-
eter of the grinding beads,” he said.
Troxler said: “It is a regular find-
ing that reducing bead diameter results
in a substantial improvement of the
achievable dispersion quality, while at
the same time, reducing the specific en-
ergy required.”
Cardolite Specialty Chemicals Europe
NV international sales manager Hans
Bosmans gave a presentation on how
manufacturers of various coatings
products can help consumers to achieve
“beautiful floors for many years to come.”
Cardolite derives its products from ca-
shew nutshell liquid, a natural, renewable
chemical raw material grown widely in
Africa, Brazil, India and Vietnam.
Cardolite’s Ultra LITE 2009 is a
Cardanol-based curing agent that is used
in the floor coatings with qualities such
as low color and nice film appearance,
fast cure, good water resistance, balanced
mechanical properties, good self-leveling
properties, and excellent weatherabil-
ity. Cardanol is the primary component
of the cashew liquid technology, which
Bosmans said is “a natural phenolic com-
pound with a long unsaturated fatty side
chain.”
The curing agent is “ideal for floor top
coats, good replacement for cycloaliphat-
ic amine,” according to Bosmans.
He said formulators can take ad-
vantage of the product’s “good leveling
properties to reduce the number of coat-
ing layers required in a project or to use
the same curing agent for the self-leveller
and topcoat.”
CelluComp’s Kemp-Griffins talked
to the EACC participants on the criti-
cal subject of choosing the right prod-
uct for coating formulations to ensure
the final product meets “the demands
of the environmental and performance
demands of customers.”
He explained how coatings manu-
facturers can use the company’s Curran
brand, which is developed from the ex-
traction of nano-cellulose fibers of root
vegetables and “offers exceptional rheo-
logical and mechanical properties for nu-
merous applications, such as
paints and coatings, personal
care, home care, cosmetics,
concrete, drilling fluids, com-
posites and other potential
applications.”
He said the use of Curran
provides saving for both inte-
rior and exterior paint formu-
lations such as 8 percent to 58
percent reduction in binder, 25
percent reduction in coales-
cent, 17 percent reduction in
anti seize spray thickener, 80
percent reduction in hydroxy-
ethylcellulose (HEC), and 5
percent to 10 percent reduction
in titanium dioxide (TiO2).
Frank Abschlag of Elementis
Germany GmbH, a manufacturer of rheo-
logical additives and pigment dispersions
for the coatings, inks, adhesives, construc-
tion industries, said paint formulators in
Africa, who are used to “mid- to high-
PVC latex paints dominated by the use of
HEC,” can effectively “combine HEC with
other thickeners to overcome an often-no-
ticed limitation in workability.”
He gave the example of mixing the company’s rheology modifier
RHEOLATE and HEC which he said
“work synergistically and will give you
excellent paint application properties”
such as good sag stability, better dilution
stability than when one uses HEC alone.
Abschlag said Elementis GmbH’s
RHEOLATE 150 “works in the
same viscosity range than HEC while
RHEOLATE 175 gives better flow and
levelling properties.”
The East African Coatings Congress,
which attracted 55 exhibitors and more
than 450 participants, had more than 12
presentations from company executives,
industry analysts and the United Nations
Environmental Programme. CW
