Bayer Materialscience Presentation Explores The Next Generation Of Waterborne Polyurethane Coatings For Wood Floors

Pittsburgh, PA - In their ongoing quest to provide the safest, highest-quality products possible, scientists from Bayer MaterialScience LLC (BMS) have explored new pathways to make aqueous polyurethane dispersions without the co-solvent n-methylpyrolidone (NMP), a suspected fetotoxin.

Pete Schmitt, aqueous technology platform leader for BMS, explores this important topic in detail in his presentation Waterborne Polyurethane Coatings for Wood Floors – The Next Generation. Schmitt will give the presentation at the Federation of Societies for Coatings Technology (FSCT) symposium "Coating Wood and Wood Composites: Designing for Durability," which runs July 23-25 in Seattle.

In his presentation, Schmitt gives an overview of potential alternatives to NMP, which has been labeled toxic by the EU Commission Working Group on the Classification and Labeling of Dangerous Substances. These potential alternatives include methods to process materials with alternate co-solvents as well as with co-solvents that can be removed from the product during processing. Some of the approaches Schmitt explores and the resulting dispersions allow for the formulation of coatings with the same or even better properties than dispersions made by the prepolymer mixing process using NMP.

"NMP has been the solvent of choice for the widely used prepolymer mixing process for aqueous polyurethane dispersion synthesis," explained Schmitt. "Now, however, BMS has utilized an alternate process to develop new co-solvent free polyurethane dispersions useful as coatings for wood floors that have outstanding properties, are low odor and, most significantly, are free of NMP."

SOURCE: Bayer MaterialScience LLC