International. Coatings and adhesives manufacturers are under pressure: they compete for market share, optimize their products quickly, and must focus on efficiency while ensuring sustainability and regulatory compliance. At the same time, products must be increasingly circular, without compromising the properties of a coating or adhesive. A crucial factor in all of this: the right binders and crosslinkers. Its development is carried out in material manufacturers such as Covestro. The German company is now addressing these requirements by announcing that, in 2025, it will open an automated laboratory specifically developed to optimize coatings and adhesives formulations to better serve its customers.
"Thanks to our automated laboratory, we can collaborate with our customers on the future of coatings and adhesives. Since it operates almost entirely autonomously and learns from our knowledge and the existing data lake, as well as from the new data generated, the process of optimizing and developing formulations is much more efficient and accurate. This allows us to optimize existing formulations more quickly or even develop completely new formulations for our customers and in collaboration with them," says Thomas Büsgen, Head of the laboratory.
Testing of binder and crosslinker formulations
Specifically, the new laboratory will test formulations with Covestro binders and crosslinkers for coatings and adhesives. Its intelligent selection guarantees properties such as hardness, adhesion, opacity, gloss or durability. These formulations usually consist of between seven and fifteen components, the combination of which determines the properties of the final product. The high number of possible combinations resulting means that standard formulations are commonly used. The new laboratory allows for more extensive test series, thanks also to the computer-aided design of the test series and the use of automation.
"Our new automated laboratory gives us more possibilities for testing formulations. It frees our specialized laboratories from their usual tasks and allows samples to be analyzed more systematically. This allows us to further focus our experience and expertise on customer-specific topics or test approaches that we would not have been able to implement otherwise," says Martin Merkens, EMLA Sales and Market Development Manager in Covestro's Coatings & Adhesives business unit. "This will benefit us particularly in the area of the circular economy: alternative raw materials, e.g. bio-based or recycled materials, can be analysed more quickly and their properties assessed in the final product."
Installation to run tens of thousands of tests per year
The new facilities can operate 24/7. The goal is to perform tens of thousands of tests per year. This sets a new standard in terms of quantity, variety, accuracy, and speed of testing. Another advantage: the automated laboratory generates a large amount of structured data. Therefore, knowledge about formulation possibilities and influencing factors will increase 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 objectives and simultaneously verify them in the automated laboratory, thus creating a self-learning system.
In addition to formulating water- and solvent-based single-component and two-component systems, the automated laboratory also performs numerous material tests on the raw materials themselves, their formulations and the applied films. The application can even be carried out in different climates within the laboratory to simulate the use of the product under the application conditions. The progressive digitalization of the laboratory at Covestro also makes it easier to send the generated samples to more specialized testing laboratories. This allows data sets to be supplemented with market-specific test results and relevant dependencies to be identified more quickly.
