New Generation Water-based Associative Rheology Modifiers to meet current Market Demands

 
One of the important drivers in coatings development is improving the environmental impact of coatings whereby many contributing aspects are taken into consideration, including formulation composition, manufacturing, application, life time, removal and disposal. At the same time, innovations must be cost competitive on the market and create advanced performance characteristics as required by the current market trends. Hydrophobically modified ethylene oxide urethanes or 'HEUR' rheology modifiers offer a number of interesting properties in coating formulations since they can provide rheology profiles offering excellent flow and levelling, they deliver good water resistance properties and offer efficient products to increase the high shear application viscosity. An enhanced technology has been developed in HEUR chemistry to offer ways to produce concentrated HEUR rheology modifiers without the need for organic solvent or other additives, like surfactants, to suppress the solution viscosity. This allows to produce water based HEURs with low 'as supplied' viscosity for ease of handling in production. In addition, this technology offer materials that contribute to narrow the gap in several performance area's including increased thickening efficiency and cost in use, improved balance between levelling and sag, improve applied hide, reduced viscosity loss upon tinting and efficient high shear viscosity builders with good syneresis stability.