Waterborne polymer coatings for sustainable wood protection

There is currently a major drive within the wood coatings industry to reduce the VOC (volatile organic compounds) levels in solvent based formulations. Currently, more sustainable water-based alternatives lead to less aesthetically pleasing coatings due to a phenomenon called 'grain raising'. This project will attempt to address this problem by utilising advanced analytical techniques to understand this issue and seeks to develop new strategies to overcome this problem. In the project we aim to;

i) Develop analytical methods to quantify the severity of grain rise.
ii) Confirm the mechanism by which grain rise occurs and correlate this to known coatings systems.
iii) Investigate coating formulation parameters and their impact on grain rise.
iv) Explore the mechanism of interaction of 'surface modifiers' with wood surfaces and to protect the substrate from grain rise