International. With its new fully automated plant for testing coating formulations, Evonik reported that it can speed up the search for optimal formulations. The high-performance plant allows the company to systematically test more formulations over the same period of time as before.
For Evonik customers, this means they can optimize and develop their coating formulations more quickly, saving valuable time when launching new products on the market.
The number of combinations of substances for coating formulations is enormous. Even if ten hardeners, ten binders, ten pigments and ten additives are taken into account in the development of a coating formulation, 104 or 10,000 combinations are obtained. And this does not even include variations in proportions.
The company explains that in practice it is impossible to cover the full range of possibilities or test the properties of all combinations and proportions. However, a systematic search for the optimal coating formulation requires exactly one examination of a huge range of options. With the installation of its high-performance plant, Evonik's coating experts have found a solution to this dilemma.
In the first step, the plant automatically distributes the raw materials and formulates them into coatings. In the second stage, the substrates are coated with the formulations, dried and then transported to the test station. At the test stand, the properties of the formulations are characterized. All steps are performed automatically according to a precisely defined schedule that can be played at any time.
The plant consists of 52 elements that are combined into 30 functionalities; each functionality is designed to handle a specific task (for example, applying a coating formulation to a substrate). The 52 elements are connected by a railway system that runs through all parts of the plant; in railway systems, containers and substrates are transported via the shuttle. In addition, there are 13 robots that carry out various activities such as loading the shuttle or placing coated substrates in the furnace.
Within 24 hours, an average of 120 samples can be formulated in the plant. While these are being applied to a substrate and characterized, experiments for a new project can be initiated.
Thanks to technology and software, the HTE plant is reliable and reproducible at any time. Records any deviations from the target value and saves them. This means that in the case of eye-catching results, it is easy to check if there have been irregularities in the work processes.
With up to 600 parameters, 40 different work steps can be defined in the HTE plant. This allows Evonik to freely combine individual steps into one workflow and incorporate the various customer requirements.
