Repellency Treatments

What are the substrates under consideration?

 This is critical to understand what tech options are available to consider. For surfaces such as porcelain, there is not an oxide containing surface, so you need a method to apply a durable treatment and then we are limited to short lifetime options due to this. Most often, customers do not want to reapply on a daily/weekly basis.

What are functional properties and performance expectations?

This is critical to determining if there is a technology in our portfolio of products.  If customers want a super hydrophobic (150°+), it can be applied but it is not an easy application for very large surfaces (reapplication needed would be tedious and frequent). Also any superhydrophobic that can be applied (including competitive materials we are aware of as well) is extremely fragile and sensitive, usually only acceptable for one-time use applications or where frequent re-application is acceptable. Often times people say "superhydrophobic" but a regular hydrophobic of 120° will meet the need when permanency is needed, so we try to gather clarification on what is really required.

What are the durability requirements, expected lifetime, and any other technical merits?

Customers often want a certain level of durability in the magnitude of months, years, or possibly the life of the product. Even for hydrophobic applications on an oxide surface where we can apply a more robust coating, flooring is just a poor application due to the level of aggressive abrasion and wear seen. Also for outdoor applications a majority of our treatments are UV sensitive and quickly break down in sunlight. So again an important consideration.

What materials will the treated part come in contact with?

Details here give us an idea of how long the coating can be reasonably expected to last.

Do you have a mandatory process parameter requirement?

Spray, dip, wipe, printing. Answers to this question helps to focus in on options when multiple routes are feasible.

How soon do you require a solution for implementation?

This helps us to determine urgency, and also how soon we can expect to see a return on our time investment.

What is the annual volume expectation for this treated part?

Is this a commercial or research project? It is good to gather whether this is for a one-off project, or for a company in production.

Has a budget been allocated for this project?

This helps us to understand if they have funds for qualification/optimization work

What is your price expectation for the treatment on a per-unit basis?

Applications that are typically low value, with high expectations often fall outside our core competencies which rather focus on applications that have a high value to the proposed solution