Reactive Diluents – Leading A High-solids Waterborne Polyurethane System

By Author: david lee
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Have you ever tried to determine the importance of reactive diluents in the sustenance of a high solids waterborne polyurethane system? If not, this is the right time to do this. These diluents are used in large numbers of industries including coatings, civil engineering, and structural composites. Moreover, they are odorless and have low viscosity which makes them get easily mixed with epoxy resins in order to provide superior protection.

On comparing them against other general curing techniques available, reactive diluents make the epoxy resins to be less viscous. These things make the condition very easy to follow. This is the foremost reason why these diluents are high in demand across various industries. These curing agents exhibit superb performance since voc component in paints and coatings became the major target of regulations.

There could be various options available to you but the best idea is to employ low molecular weights polyols to result into a lower viscosity formulation that requires less solvent. Drastically, these reductions in molecular weights sometimes result into systems that cure ...
... too quickly and difficult to perform well in the field. . These polyols pose a threat of high intrinsic viscosities without reductions in molecular weights which in turn makes it very hard to throw out solvent from the formulation.

Let’s view it from a different perspective.Reactive diluents are low viscosity co-reactants that are developed specifically to reduce VOCs with the help of a reaction with the polymer matrix.They are very much a like to regular solvents as they tend to reduce polyurethane prepolymers viscosity, but they do so without augmenting VOCs. These reactive diluents generally take the form of blocked or delayed sources of active hydrogen. A very appreciable example is Aldimines and Ketimines that are block amino compounds. Do you know oxazolidines are also a part of blocked amino alcohols?

Reactive diluents support higher solids and lower viscosity. This property often goes well for trouble-free applications of higher-solids coatings. There is another ray of hope for reactive diluents are the use of diverse functional moieties to effect cure of coatings. Nowadays, high-solids coatings majorly depend on the chemistry of hydroxyl functional groups.

The low viscosity of reactive diluents supports the production of high solids and low VOC formulations. They are deliberately developed to support the production of high build, high solids coatings with carbon dioxide gassing. They can be used as bi- or tetra-functional curing agent. They confer tolerance to repeated opening of containers.Want to know more about reactive diluents? Founded in 1986, Incorez Ltd has rapidly gained prominence as a specialist manufacturer of oxazolidines, waterborne epoxy curing agents and waterborne polyurethane dispersions.