- Paints are a crucial material, integral to prolonging the lifespan of products from cars to wind turbines.
- To make paints work better for longer, we need to understand how they work from a fundamental scientific perspective.
- Sustainable Coatings by Rational Design (SusCoRD) is an academic-industry partnership that brings together academic experts from across the North of England to gain this underpinning know how, to enable industry to find ways to create paints differently
- The aim is pave the way to creating more sustainable coatings that last longer, delivering economic benefits to UK by prolonging the lifespan of the products they protect.
Paint - an economically and environmentally critical material
In the UK, over 10,000 people work in the coatings industry, which contributes over £11 billion to the economy, and supports the manufacturing and construction sectors worth around £150 billion.Corrosion damage costs the UK 2-3% of its Gross National Product each year (about £60 billion in 2016). Protective coatings like paints help prevent corrosion but are complex to formulate, meaning new product developments is slow.
With a growing demand for sustainable materials that extend the lifespan of infrastructure like wind turbines, it’s crucial to understand how these coatings work to get new, better performing and more sustainable products to market.
Manchester’s corrosion research expertise
AkzoNobel and The University of Manchester are collaborating to address this through their research.Claudio Di Lullo, Manager of AkzoNobel’s Substrate Protection Expertise Centre, explains: "About 12 years ago, we set up a partnership with The University of Manchester because we recognise that corrosion is one of the big challenges we have to face. We make paint, we develop paint. We understand the practical applications and what’s needed to make it perform.
"What the University brings is the ability to characterise, analyse and understand some of the mechanisms. They can do deeper science that’s an essential part of understanding what’s going on. We get fresh insights that will help us to develop the next generation of paint."
Understanding the fundamentals of how paint works
Building on this partnership, Manchester and AzkoNobel developed ’Sustainable Coatings by Rational Design’ (SusCoRD), a five-year interdisciplinary EPSRC Prosperity Partnership, that brings together a critical mass of expertise - spanning academic knowledge from the universities of Manchester, Sheffield, and Liverpool capabilities - to understand how paint works.In an industry-first, the partnership looked to match a detailed scientific understanding of the mechanisms of coatings failure with state-of-the-art machine learning. The aim was to deliver a framework for developing more sustainable protective coatings and nanocomposite materials using digital design. This would help enable industry to replace the current trial-and-error and test new, sustainable materials, accelerating the formulation of new products.
Uniting corrosion science with machine learning
Working across four specific workstreams, the teams drove discoveries across two main areas:analysis characterisation of coatings in the substrate, the polymer and interfaces; and digital technology, specifically predictive approaches, modelling and simulation, with the aim to ultimately producing digital twins.
Manchester led on corrosion protection, with Sheffield and Liverpool focusing on polymer interface and machine learning, respectively. Their work focuses on:
- Predictive Design and Testing: By undertaking a review of AkzoNobel’s historic corrosion test data, researchers were able to find the best formulations for corrosion protection. Applying machine learning models, they were then able predict and optimise these formulations, creating models that could successfully identify new, effective combinations. To support this, complementary tools were developed to automatically interpret electrochemical data, improving accuracy and efficiency.
- Polymers and interfaces: The team studied how small molecules like water and solvents interact with polymer surfaces with Manchester leading on advanced microscopy, to explore how polymers and metals bond. Key results included the discovery that that metal-polymer binding has a much larger influence in measurements than previously thought - a critical insight in the drive to create more high-performance, eco-friendly high solid and water-borne coating systems.
- Coatings and substrates: Using a combination of analytical electron microscopy and X-Ray CT, researchers were able to characterise the microstructural evolution in polyester powder coating, revealing different stages in the degradation process. By identifying and mitigating microstructural weak points, finding ways to control microstructure - which previously reduced the efficacy of coatings - and by understanding the key properties affecting performance, the researchers have advanced insight to inform the way durable coatings are formulated.
- Simulation and modelling: . By creating and studying digital models, the team was able to interrogate experimental results and test hypothesis when physical experiments were unable to provide relevant information. These models created ranged from atomic-level analsyis of the polymer/substrate interface, to understanding how a flaw in the coating impacts an electrochemical cell.
Creating the sustainable paints of the future
The findings of the five-year project can now be used to inform higher-technology readiness level research, which in turn will help unlock ways to making more sustainable paint.
Claudio Di Lullo explains: "At AkzoNobel, we recognise our paint has a carbon footprint contribution and we’ve set the ambitious target in 2030 of having a 50% reduction in the carbon footprint across the whole value chain.
"The potential impacts of this project, for us as a company are to produce new generation products that perform better and are more sustainable, and for us to do it quicker. Machine learning gives us the angle to accelerate our new product development."
Professor Stuart Lyon, from The University of Manchester adds: "There are two aspects of sustainability. The manufacture of the paint needs to be sustainable, but also its materials need to be sustainable. And that essentially means making it last longer, so we don’t have to repaint assets like wind turbines, mid-life, which is hugely expensive.
"The work we’ve done so far has involved using all these analytical tools to explore the science behind how paint works and to create opportunities to make paints differently. The next stage is to use that information to develop tools that make paint in different ways, using different materials, which are perhaps more sustainable - which last longer, which create assets that have a much greater lifetime."
For more information visit the SuSCoRD project site
To discuss this project further, or to explore future collaboration contact Xiaorong Zhou , Professor of Corrosion Science and Engineering or Dr Jane Deakin , SusCoRD project manager.
Related papers:
Evaluating organic coating performance by EIS: Correlation between long-term EIS measurements and corrosion of the metal substrate.
Manipulating transport paths of inhibitor pigments in organic coating by addition of other pigments.
The influence of mechanical grinding on the microstructure and corrosion behaviour of A356 aluminium alloys.
The effect of cross-linker structure on interfacial interactions, polymer dynamics and network composition in an epoxy-amine resin.
Prosperity Partnerships
Prosperity Partnerships are collaborative research programmes funded jointly by businesses and the UK government through the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and other UKRI councils.Prosperity Partnerships are an opportunity for businesses and their existing academic partners to co-create and co-deliver a business-led programme of research activity arising from a clear industrial need.
To explore a Prosperity Partnership with Manchester, contact our Business Engagement team at collaborate@manchester.ac.uk
Advanced materials is one of The University of Manchester’s research beacons - exemplars of interdisciplinary collaboration and cross-sector partnerships that lead to pioneering discoveries and improve the lives of people around the world. For more information, head to The University of Manchester’s advanced materials page.
