At this year’s All China Leather Exhibition (ACLE), which took place from September 3 to 5, 2019, in Shanghai, China, speciality chemicals company LANXESS presented a new system offering for functional coatings under the name Pellart.
“Our offering specifically does not use leather as a substrate,†stressed Dr Rita Dicke, head of the OLC – Functional Coatings integrated business platform in the LANXESS Leather business unit. Dicke went on to explain that the aim was rather to make coating systems for the production of high-quality surfaces accessible to customers that process other substrates besides leather. For this purpose, LANXESS is bundling its many years of experience plus extensive application technology and analytical expertise in base products and additives to formulate such functional coatings. To make surface design as easy as possible for customers, LANXESS is offering individually developed system solutions that are ready to use immediately.
It is an art to incorporating the many and varied options for the design of flexible surfaces in the formulation of a coating system. The fact that LANXESS experts have mastered this art lays the foundation for high-quality, customer-oriented intermediates and end products. The new Pellart products take this into account.
An important area of application for such coatings is vehicle interiors, such as seats, door trims, roof linings and the surfaces of instrument panels. The requirements for the feel, gloss level plus temperature and abrasion resistance, simultaneously combined with the lowest possible concentrations of volatile organic compounds (VOC), are especially strict in this area. “This presents a particularly good opportunity for us to prove what we are capable of,†said Dicke, with confidence.
The experience that LANXESS has been able to gain over decades of working with leather is an important basis on which to now develop impressive solutions for customers on other substrates using Pellart. Building on carefully designed and tried-and-tested basic formulations, these can promptly be made available to customers.
In addition to various plastics – such as polyvinyl chloride (PVC), thermoplastic polyolefins (TPO) and polyurethane (PUR) – textiles are also of great importance as flexible coating carriers. Carrier layers made of microfibres, for example, achieve particularly attractive property profiles regarding haptics and durability. This is demonstrated by a low-VOC microfibre fleece for scooter seats that is coated using Pellart.