The essential role of chemical passivations and thin organic coatings is to provide corrosion protection during handling, transport and storage of metallic coated products. The combination of environmental constraints with all of the required in-use performances significantly increases the complexity of these products.
Environmental regulations at European (REACH) level ban the use of hazardous substances such as hexavalent chromium. Recently, some countries added further constraints at national level, such as new limits on volatile organic compounds (VOC) emissions. The combination of these new environmental constraints with all of the existing required performances significantly increases the complexity of these chemical passivation and thin organic coating products.
Developing solutions for the customer
Over the past decade, OCAS supported its customers in achieving compliance with these regulations. Making use of their expertise in corrosion protection, the OCAS coating team was able to develop solutions with guaranteed in-use performance and assist in the industrial roll-out of production lines using these solutions. Today, OCAS continues to provide technical support after industrial introduction and ramping-up phase.
Lab method to predict exhaust emission
To meet the national regulations on VOC content in the exhaust, OCAS started by developing a lab method to “predict” the on-line VOC exhaust emission level. Using gas chromatography and carrying out VOC measurements on the production site, a correlation could be established between VOC content in the liquid formulation and the VOC emission at the production line exhaust. Based on this result, the selection of promising formulations was accelerated significantly, and a compliant solution could be identified.
“Thanks to our expertise in corrosion protection, we are able to pro-actively adapt formulations in accordance with future regulations.”
