R&D Magazine announced Hybrid Plastics Inc. as a winner of its prestigious 2013 R&D 100 Award for the company’s POSS UV Flash Curable 100% Solids White Paint.

Since 1963, the R&D 100 Awards have identified revolutionary technologies newly introduced to the market. Many of these have become household names, helping shape everyday life for many Americans. This represents the third time Hybrid Plastics has received an R&D 100 Award. The first was in 2000 for the company’s Molecular Silicas, a family of nanoscopic silica and carbon-based hybrid additives, which dramatically improves the strength, heat resistance and hydrophobicity of traditional plastics. The second in 2009 was for the use of POSS as a universal flow aid which molecularly dissolves into resins without affecting optical clarity or mechanical properties.

Now Hybrid Plastics has set a new standard for white 100% solids UV flash-curable coatings which can be applied direct to metal (DTM) through the use its polyhedral oligomeric silsesquioxane (POSS) universal dispersant chemistry. In the past, even when solid color UV curable paints were developed for direct to metal substrates, a cost-effective white coating was tantalizingly out of reach due to the high refractive index of TiO2. For the first time, by using POSS white, low-viscosity, ultrahigh TiO2 loadings are achieved thereby allowing thinner coating thicknesses without significant pretreatment, application constraints or the sacrificing of high line speed. Compared to solvent based and water based and other UV curable paints this product enables ~50% reductions in dry film coating thickness and a four to five times increase in surface coverage. Since white is one of the three common base or primer coats in virtually all metal surfaces that are decorated or painted, the potential benefits are real and significant in multiple industry segments.

Hybrid has developed a platform technology called POSS. It is a new chemical based on silicon-derived building blocks that provide nanometer-scale control to dramatically improve the properties of traditional polymers, colorants and fillers. They release no VOCs and, thereby, produce no odor or air pollution. They are biocompatible and recyclable. POSS nanoscopic chemical technology provides unique opportunities to create material combinations through a melding of the desirable properties of ceramics and polymers at the 1-nm length scale. These new combinations enable the circumvention of classic material performance trade-offs by exploiting the synergy and properties that only occur between materials at the nanoscale.

Source: Hybrid Plastics