For Europe’s coatings industry,  like many other manufacturing  sectors  in the region,  a key objective is sustainability so that the sector sharply reduces its CO2 emissions by switching to low carbon materials with a minimum carbon footprint and helps to  conserve resources through reuse and recycling of products and their ingredients.

Also  it wants  to embrace  the latest  technologies so that it continues to be a leading force  in innovation and product quality in the global coatings  market.

Recent results  and analysis of  major research projects, mostly state or European Union-funded,  in sectors  like coatings and their raw materials, have indicated that  achieving sustainability and advanced technology  objectives could be a long haul.  It is especially a big challenge for  coatings and raw materials  producers who are  small and medium size  enterprises (SMEs)  with limited  resources. 

The main problem – pinpointed by groups of experts  advising the European Commission, the EU  executive, and national governments –has been what has been dubbed  the “Valley  of Death.”  This is the space in R&D  projects between the achievement of a prototype and the later  stages  needed for its  commercialization.  Because of a lack of post-prototype evidence  of  market potential, developers have difficulties in attracting finance and other assistance to help to bring their innovations to the marketplace.

The EU  and national governments have  tried to resolve  the problem of lack of money by extending the availability of their research funds from the prototype stage – classified as technology readiness level 4 – to TRL 7, which is the stage for demonstrating a product in an operational environment but two stages short of  that needed for full-scale production readiness. 

In a report issued in October, a high level group (HLG) of  experts concluded that insufficient technological support for SMEs was causing a slower uptake of  nanotechnologies and advanced materials, including coatings. It recommended to the European Commission the creation of a  network of  “innovation hubs.” These would provide facilities for developers to characterise  materials and  model their  production  engineering  and scale-ups  and gain access to pilot plants for demonstrating new products and their manufacturing processes.

However, for sectors like coatings there are other problems besides the low  availability  of  pilot  facilities  and absence of  engineering expertise. These  include the high cost  of renewable and other sustainable  materials  and  disjointed  value  chains which hamper the necessity  for close collaboration between coatings  producers and their suppliers in the development of, for example, innovative  raw materials.

These  weaknesses  were highlighted  in the outcome of  a  EU-funded  project  on the development of biosolvents with the main outlet being the coatings  sector.  The  three-year  scheme, called ECOBIOFOR which was completed  late last year, was one of the biggest, European  cross-border  research schemes in coatings  because of the  large  numbers of people represented by its  participants.  These included two coatings  associations,  Europe’s main coatings trade body – the European Council of the Paint, Printing Ink and Artists’ Colours  Industry – and PROCOAT of Italy,  and three biotech associations in Spain, Portugal and Switzerland. 

The three manufacturers in the project consisted of a French solvents producer and two coatings SMEs  from Spain and France. Also  there were three  research and technological development (RTD) specialists, headed by Tecnalia  of  Spain and an advisory board  of green raw material suppliers.

ECOBIOFOR  developed three different  bio-based solvents – a  bio-ethyl acetate produced from bio-ethanol by esterification, two butyl bio-acetates, made from bio-butanol by esterification  and a bio-butyl glycol produced from bio-butanol.    None have  so far been commercialized.

The problems  confronting the projects  team and the need for further research were detailed in a recently published final results report. “The economics  of these new synthesizing  routes require a careful study,”  it said. “Commercially produced quantities should  (be produced) at the similar level of solvents derived from petrochemicals.  This is a challenge indeed, especially with today’s low oil prices.  There certainly is a lot to do to optimize the processes developed in the project before the biomass route holds a promising  future.”

A barrier to commercialization was the reluctance of solvents producers, biotech companies and coatings producers  to move into bio-solvent manufacture.

“The main challenge  is the identification of  industry partners who are willing to switch from alcohols to bio-alcohols in their solvent production,” said Idoia Etxeberria  of Tecnalia, the project co-ordinator.  The paint industry does not have the capacity or business interest to start solvent production.  But it would be very interested to apply these bio-solvents if available in sufficient quantities and at a competitive price.”

Gradually a commercialization  infrastructure of the sort recommended by the European Commission’s advisors is beginning to emerge, at least  in northern Europe.

In Finland, VTT Research Centre, one of the country’s main research institutes, has pilot plants available for innovators  in coatings  and  related applications in order to bridge the gap between laboratory-scale development and commercial-scale production.

“Our pilot plant for dispersions and foam coatings is small scale but it is large enough to enable innovators to demonstrate their coatings products on a range of substrates including plastics,” explained Ulla  Forsstroem, a principal scientist  at VTT.  “The scheme has been a success in helping products progress to commercialisation.”

In the UK  the state-owned Centre for Process Innovation (CPI) provides at  similar service from its base at Teesside in northeast  England with facilities covering prototyping, demonstration and scale-up, including process modelling and simulation derived from pilot plant production.

CPI  provided a  platform for  the Scottish company CelluComp for the development of a nano cellulose rheology modifier  which has since been used by several coatings formulators. 

“Working with CPI has enabled us to reduce the risk of moving from lab to production scale  by utilizing CPI’s process facilities and expertise before making a significant capital investment in our own facility,”  said Eric Whale, CelluComp’s co-founder.

As  SMEs  start  to make use of the facilities at open-access research centers, larger  coatings producers and other raw material and additive suppliers are expanding into new levels of efficiency in their research activities to widen the gap between themselves and their smaller competitors.

The German-based  speciality chemicals company Evonik has opened a fully automated robot-manned  plant for the high-throughput testing of an average of 120 coatings  formulations a day.  Each formulation can consist of up to 10,000  combinations of hardeners, binding agents, pigments and additives.

The plant consists of  52 elements which are connected by a rail system transporting containers and substrates through all parts of the facility.  This is the sort of  equipment and connectivity which even state-owned  innovation hubs are unlikely to able  to afford – at least for some time.