Knowledge base

UV curing systems have been successfully introduced into a number of market segments such as printing inks, wood coatings and automotive OEM. Especially for automotive refinish applications UV curing is a powerful tool to enable a fast curing process and improve the productivity of the coating

In the past, when wood based panels for furniture components or flooring applications were supposed 'to look like wood", they have been laminated with saturated melamine paper or finish foils. Today, the direct decorative printing offers new perspectives for the upgrading of surfaces of wood based panels and low cost veneers (and many other flat wo

UV curable acrylate formulations with a high solid content of nano-sized silica were prepared toimprove their application for abrasion and scratch resistant top coats. Grafting of trialkoxysilanes onto the surface of nanoparticles facilitated their embedding in the formulation and alleviated the effect of undesired increase of viscosity and dilatan

Cationic energy curing systems are used today in different industrial applications such as coatings, release coatings and graphic arts. Coatings are primarily clear for protection of the exterior of packaging materials: mainly metals but also plastics and they take advantage of the use of cycloaliphatic diepoxyde and standard triarylsulfonium hexaf

The first UV unit worldwide for the cross-linking of UV curable hotmelt acrylates was put into operation at HERMA in Germany in 1995. Already one year earlier, tests had been carried out under production conditions in order to obtain first results with hotmelt acrylates. These tests were not limited to the UV cross-linking and the results regarding

Radiation curable powder coatings are nowadays being considered one of the most promising paint application systems. Thinking on coating wood and other thermal sensitive substrates, technical requirements for this particular market are really a challenge to the possible powder systems. The difficulties to outperform the current solvent systems are

The development of UV-radiation curing technology has lead to its acceptance in a wide range of applications such as the Graphic Arts. In response to upcoming legislation on migration levels for inks used in food packaging, two new polymeric photoinitiators have been developed that meet the demands of low migration and low odour. In this article bo

Urethane acrylates exhibit particularly good properties as binders for UV curable resins including toughness, chemical and abrasion resistance, flexibility and weather resistance (aliphatic types). On molecular basis, hydrogen bridging is largely responsible for most of these exceflent properties but contributes to a comparatively high viscosity as