The Waterborne Symposium

Abstract
"One of the key market drivers for coatings industry is to improve productivity all while maintaining high performance and meeting more stringent EHS (environment, health, and safety) requirements. Productivity improvement demands fast cure coating system that often comes as a trade – off of performance and/or using not EHS-friendly components. Due to its excellent mechanical properties, chemical resistance, and adhesion to a various substrates, two-component epoxy thermoset systems have been widely used in coatings application to protect the substrate, enhance chemical resistance and extend service life. To achieve fast cure speed, accelerators such as phenolic compounds are typically added to the two-component epoxy system to shorten the cure time. Several of the frequently used phenolic compounds are not EHS friendly and pose health and safety hazards to the workers and the environment.

This paper presents a fast cure epoxy system where the phenolic accelerator moiety is incorporated into the curing agent and our non-conventional synthetic methodology allows the product to be free of hazardous phenol which is typically present in the traditional synthesis. In addition, the fast curing agent is designed to have high functionality that enables fast property development and high crosslinking density leading to excellent chemical resistance. Fundamental study of the effect of chemical structure on cure speed, crosslinking density and chemical resistance will be detailed in this paper by comparing the fast cure curing agent to model systems.
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