This year’s event featured a panel discussion on automotive coatings.
The 41st Annual
Waterborne Symposium
Kerry Pianoforte, Editor
The School of Polymers and High Performance Materials at the University of Southern Mississippi (USM) held the 41st Annual International Waterborne, High-Solids and
Powder Coatings Symposium February 25-28 in New Orleans,
Louisiana. The Waterborne Symposium is a technical forum for
environmentally-friendly coatings technologies. Proceeds from
the symposium are used by USM for various elements of academic program development including junior faculty development, graduate student stipends, equipment acquisition and
maintenance, and especially scholarships for undergraduate
students majoring in Polymer Science. Most of these students
enter the coatings or related polymer industries upon graduation. These scholarships are key to USM’s efforts to recruit the
highest-achieving students into their Polymer program.
This year’s event featured 41 papers organized into six sessions related to various aspects of surface coatings: opening,
general, waterborne, additives, pigments and powder coatings.
Plenary Speaker: James Rawlins
The opening session began with plenary speaker, James Rawlins
of USM who presented a talk entitled “The World of Surface
Coatings is Centered Around the Glass Transition Temperature,
But Which One?”
Polymeric materials are employed in a wide variety of
applications and whether the desired performance is a me-
chanical response, specific permeability, chemical reactivity
or general response to any given stimuli, the target proper-
ties are strongly affected by the molecular dynamics of all
blended materials and reactants.
“It is reasonable to expect that polymers used in coatings
would contain or develop some degree of porosity as they rely
upon evaporation of small molecules such as water or solvents
during formation,” said Rawlins. “Many materials exhibit a
measurable glass transition. However, the use of a single value
is a macrospoic concept that does not adequately represent
the molecular and dynamic situation for a surface coating
that must, by definition, be a blend of materials, applied and
The Student Poster Session featured 22 posters.
This year’s Symposium featured 41 papers organized into six sessions related
to various aspects of surface coatings.
