The 42nd Annual
Waterborne Symposium
This annual event featured presentations on a variety of topics related to surface
coatings including waterborne, additives, pigments and emerging technologies.
Kerry Pianoforte, Editor
The School of Polymers and High Performance Materials at the University of Southern Mississippi (USM) held the 42nd Annual International Waterborne, High-Solids and
Powder Coatings Symposium February 8-13 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 53 papers organized into seven
topical sessions related to various aspects of surface coatings:
opening, academia, general, waterborne, additives, pigments
and emerging technologies.
Plenary Speaker: Dr. Rigoberto Advincula
The opening session commenced with plenary speaker, Rigoberto
Advincula of CASE Western Reserve University, Department of
Macromolecular Science & Engineering who presented a talk
entitled “Nanostructured and Smart Coatings.”
Coatings are an integral part of modern society since they
provide both barrier and packaging applications in its basic
function. Many types and classifications of coatings can be dif-
ferentiated by formulation, method of deposition or industry.
According to Advincula, it is useful to think that coatings are
essentially nanoscopic phenomena that have been translated to
macroscopic visibility.
“Nanostructuring enables the development of new coatings
and function since it alters the way a coating is able to function
at the interface in its most ultrathin form,” explained Advincula.
“This can be by way of morphology, patterning, templating, etc.
The chemistry or composition of the coating can be synthesized
or formulated in such a manner that they are congruent with
stimuli-responsive, self-healing or highly efficient properties.
One particular combination of nanostructuring at the interface
combined with new chemistry is the adaption of different poly-
mer brush methodologies by grafting.”
The presentation summarized the science and engineering be-
hind many functional and nanostructured coatings produced by
the Advincula Research Group (ARG) through the years. The fo-
cus has evolved from ultrathin film to bulk thin film phenomena.
Featured guest speakers at this year’s event were Victoria
Gelling, technical director at The Valspar Corporation who presented “Electrochemical Investigations in the Development of
High Performance Coatings” and Michael Koerner of Axalta
Coatings Systems, who presented “Extensional Rheology as
Related to Paint Atomization.”
According to Gelling, in the past, corrosion and coatings research has been a visual study. A survey of ASTM methods for
corrosion detection of coated surfaces illustrates the emphasis
on the visual assessment of corrosion detection. This has begun
to change.
“Electrochemical techniques have been utilized in the past
few decades as important methods in the study of corrosion and
coating degradation,” said Gelling. “Electrochemical techniques
allow for the determination of changes in material properties,
which often occur prior to visual changes and provide informa-
tion regarding corrosion mechanisms. Indeed, by using these
techniques, such as Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy
(EIS), Scanning Electrochemical Microscopy (SECM), and
Scanning Vibrating Electrode Technique (SVET), important
mechanistic information regarding protection/failure transitions
can be determined.”
“EIS, SECM, SVET, along with the many other electrochemi-
cal techniques, provide information that is far superior to the
historical visual corrosion assessment,” she added. “For ex-
ample, small changes in capacitance and resistance of a coated
sample can be monitored via EIS and small current densities
resulting from corrosion redox reactions can be measured via
SVET. The changes is capacitance and resistance determined
