Covestro to Launch Automated Lab for Advancing Coating and Adhesive Formulations

Coating and adhesive manufacturers face mounting pressure to compete for market share, rapidly optimize their products, and enhance efficiency while meeting sustainability and regulatory requirements. Additionally, products must become more circular without compromising performance. A key element in achieving this is the selection of suitable binders and crosslinkers, which are developed by material manufacturers like Covestro. To address these demands, the German company has announced plans to open a specialized automated laboratory in 2025, dedicated to optimizing coating and adhesive formulations and providing enhanced support to its customers.

"With our automated laboratory, we can work together with our customers on the future of coatings and adhesives. Because it operates almost completely autonomously and learns from our existing knowledge and data lake as well as newly generated data, it makes the process of optimizing and developing formulations many times more efficient and precise. This allows us to optimize existing formulations faster or even develop completely new formulations for and together with our customers. We can say: We are reaching a new level of modern research," says Thomas Büsgen, head of the laboratory.

Evaluating Formulations with Covestro Binders and Crosslinkers

The new laboratory will focus on testing formulations incorporating Covestro binders and crosslinkers for coatings and adhesives. Carefully selecting these components ensures key properties such as hardness, adhesion, opacity, gloss, and durability. Formulations typically contain seven to 15 ingredients, with their combination determining the final product's performance. Due to the vast number of possible variations, standard formulations are often used. However, the new facility will enable more extensive testing, leveraging computer-aided design and automation to optimize formulations more efficiently.

"Our new automated laboratory gives us more possibilities for testing formulations. It relieves our specialized laboratories of their standard tasks and can analyze samples more systematically. This allows us to focus our expertise and experience even more on customer-specific topics or try approaches we couldn't have implemented otherwise," says Martin Merkens, Head of Sales & Market Development EMLA in Covestro's Coatings and Adhesives business entity. “This will particularly help us in the area of circular economy: Alternative raw materials, for example bio-based or recycled materials, can be tested faster and evaluated for their properties in the final product.”

Facility Capable of Conducting Tens of Thousands of Tests Annually

The new facility will operate 24/7, with the goal of conducting tens of thousands of tests annually. This marks a new benchmark in testing volume, diversity, precision, and speed. Another key advantage is the automated generation of structured data, which accelerates insights into formulation possibilities and influencing factors. By combining this data with measurements from existing studies, specialized machine learning algorithms refine formulations further. Additionally, artificial intelligence predicts new experiments based on desired properties and verifies them in real-time within the automated lab, creating a self-learning system.

Beyond formulating water- and solvent-based 1K and 2K systems, the automated laboratory conducts extensive material testing on raw materials, formulations, and applied films. It can even simulate different climate conditions to replicate real-world application scenarios. Additionally, Covestro’s ongoing laboratory digitalization enables seamless sample transfer to specialized testing facilities. This integration enhances datasets with market-specific test results, allowing for faster identification of key dependencies and insights.

Source : Covestro