Covestro builds automated laboratory for coatings and adhesives formulations

The coatings and adhesives industry is under pressure: efficiency, sustainability and regulatory requirements must be combined with high product quality. At the same time, the need for recyclable solutions is increasing - without compromising on properties such as adhesion, gloss or durability. Binders and crosslinkers play a key role here. Covestro is responding to this with an automated laboratory that is scheduled to go into operation in 2025. It was specially developed for the optimization of coating and adhesive formulations.

Automated laboratory for coatings and adhesives

"With our automated laboratory, we can work together with our customers on the future of coatings and adhesives. Because it works almost completely autonomously and learns from our existing knowledge and wealth of data as well as from newly generated data, it makes the process of optimizing and developing formulations many times more efficient and accurate. This enables us to optimize existing recipes more quickly or even develop completely new recipes for and together with our customers. This takes us to a new level of modern research," says Thomas Büsgen, head of the laboratory. In the new laboratory, formulations are tested with Covestro binders and crosslinkers - crucial for the function and quality of the end product. Such formulations usually consist of seven to 15 components. In order to efficiently evaluate the large number of possible combinations, a computer-aided design of the test series is used.

Faster testing of paint and adhesive formulations

"Our new, automated laboratory gives us more options when testing formulations. It relieves our specialist laboratories of their standard tasks and can analyze samples more systematically. This allows us to use our expertise and experience even more for customer-specific topics or to try out approaches that we would otherwise not have been able to implement," says Martin Merkens, Head of Sales & Market Development EMLA. "This will help us, especially in the area of the circular economy: Alternative, for example bio-based or recycled raw materials can be tested more quickly and evaluated for their properties in the end product." The system will run 24/7 and carry out tens of thousands of tests every year. Thanks to structured data collection, machine learning and AI, formulations can be developed more efficiently - including on the basis of property targets. In addition to formulations, the laboratory also tests materials under real climatic conditions. Samples and results are passed on to specialized laboratories via digital interfaces - for even more precise, market-oriented developments.