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Focus on crosslinkers and binders
Testing of tens of thousands of formulations per year possible
Digitalization and automation enables data-driven research and development
Networked robotics allows more efficient data generation for even more segment-specific application testing
The new automated lab of Covestro can operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The goal is to run tens of thousands of tests annually. © Covestro
Coating and adhesive manufacturers are under pressure: They compete for market share, optimize their products in rapid succession, and must focus on efficiency while ensuring sustainability and regulatory compliance. At the same time, products need to become increasingly circular – without compromising the properties of a coating or adhesive. A critical factor in all of this: The right binders and crosslinkers. Their development takes place at material manufacturers like Covestro. The German company is now addressing these requirements by announcing that in the course of 2025, it will open a specifically developed, automated laboratory for optimizing coating and adhesive formulations to provide even better support to its customers.
"With our automated laboratory, we can work together with our customers on the future of coatings and adhesives. Because it operates almost completely autonomously and learns from our existing knowledge and data lake as well as newly generated data, it makes the process of optimizing and developing formulations many times more efficient and precise. This allows us to optimize existing formulations faster or even develop completely new formulations for and together with our customers. We can say: We are reaching a new level of modern research," says Thomas Büsgen, head of the laboratory.
Testing Formulations with Covestro Binders and Crosslinkers
Specifically, the new laboratory will test formulations with Covestro binders and crosslinkers for coatings and adhesives. Their clever selection ensures properties such as hardness, adhesion, opacity, gloss, or durability. Such formulations typically consist of seven to 15 components, whose combination determines the properties of the final product. The resulting high number of possible combinations means that standard formulations are usually used. The new laboratory now enables more extensive test series, also thanks to the computer-aided design of test series and the use of automation.
"Our new automated laboratory gives us more possibilities for testing formulations. It relieves our specialized laboratories of their standard tasks and can analyze samples more systematically. This allows us to focus our expertise and experience even more on customer-specific topics or try approaches we couldn't have implemented otherwise," says Martin Merkens, Head of Sales & Market Development EMLA in Covestro's Coatings and Adhesives business entity. “This will particularly help us in the area of circular economy: Alternative raw materials, for example bio-based or recycled materials, can be tested faster and evaluated for their properties in the final product.”
Facility to Run Tens of Thousands of Tests Annually
The new facility can operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The goal is to run tens of thousands of tests annually. This sets a new standard in terms of number, variety, precision, and testing speed. Another advantage: The automated laboratory generates a large amount of structured data. The knowledge about formulation possibilities and influencing factors thus will grow rapidly. The collected data, combined with measurement data from existing studies, is evaluated using special machine learning algorithms to further improve formulations. Artificial intelligence is also used to predict new experiments based on property goals and simultaneously verify them in the automated laboratory – creating a self-learning system.
In addition to formulating water- and solvent-based 1K and 2K systems, the automated laboratory also performs numerous material tests on the raw materials themselves, their formulations, and applied films. Application can even take place in different climates in the lab to simulate product use under application conditions. The progressing laboratory digitalization across Covestro also enables easy forwarding of generated samples to more specialized testing laboratories. This makes it possible to supplement the datasets with market-specific test results and identify relevant dependencies more quickly.
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