UV curable Clearcoats - A Scratch Resistant and Weatherfast Alternative to Thermosetting Clearcoats

UV-curing has found over the past years increasing number of industrial applications and will find even more areas of applications in the years to come. The major reasons for that are its unique benefits, e.g. solvent free formulations, high cure speed and low temperature processing. In addition to these benefits two additional properties of UV-cured coatings are of interest today, especially in the automotive industry: scratch resistance and resistance against chemicals. Before this technology, however, can be broad introduced to the car industry as well as to the general coating industry one major field where UV-curing has stUl to show that it is able to compete with existing coating technologies is the area of outdoor applications 1]. For that reason, we put a lot of efforts in this technology over the last couple of years.