American Coatings Award winner announced

Even though the American Coatings Show Conference was cancelled, the organizers of the conference reviewed all the submitted papers. For her work on better understanding of stain resistance, Zeena Cherian of Ashland Specialty Ingredients was just announced as this year’s winner.

Achieving stain-resistant properties for paints requires a combination of tailored polymer dispersions, balanced paint formulation ingredients and efficient use of rheology modifiers. To design such coatings a deep understanding of the involved mechanisms is important. In her paper "New Techniques to Understand Stain Resistance Properties of Waterbased Architectural Paints” Zeena Cherian describes a number of techniques with individual strengths and weaknesses and how to combine them for a better understanding of stain resistance.

Among the techniques she describes how to use molecular modelling simulations and Atomic Force Microscopy to study stain interaction and coating surface chemistry. Additionally, a technique based on Quartz Crystal Microbalance was used to study adsorption and de-sorption of stains.