Resin for coatings is gradually moving towards a commercialized market

The "Seminar on Resin Application Technology for Coatings and Working Meeting of Backbone Enterprise Leaders in the Coating Resin Industry Branch" aimed at guiding coating production enterprises to upgrade their products was recently held in Shanghai. Nearly 70 representatives from coating resin production enterprises and coating enterprises attended the meeting, discussing the current situation and development trends of the resin market for wood coatings, the personalized development direction of acrylic resins, the application of new initiators in high solid and water-based acrylic resins, the production and application status of water-based resins, the production and application of water-soluble modified acrylic resins, the application technology of water-based alkyd resins and water-based epoxy ester resins, and the application technology of fluororesins for coatings.
Yue Wangkun, Secretary General of China Coatings Industry Association, attended the meeting. He revealed during the briefing that China's paint industry is growing at a rate of over 10% per year. According to data from the National Bureau of Statistics, the production reached 3.82 million tons last year and exceeded 3.16 million tons in the first eight months of this year, a year-on-year increase of 25%. It is possible to exceed 4.5 million tons for the whole year, and with some data not included in the statistics, it is entirely possible to produce 6 million tons annually. The annual demand for synthetic resins, especially solvent based synthetic resins, that are compatible with it reaches 700000 to 800000 tons. With the significant changes in the resin market for coatings, its product manufacturing will further develop towards scale and commercialization, and it is imperative to improve the national standards for resin for coatings.
The speakers attending this seminar are all frontline practitioners in production. According to their introduction, there were no professional resin manufacturers in China in the early days, and the liquid resins used in coatings were all produced and used by coating enterprises themselves. Most wood coating factories produced their own alkyd resins, mainly modified with castor oil, which dried slowly. In the mid to late 1990s, some professional resin manufacturers from Taiwan and abroad began to enter, driving the development of the domestic resin industry and providing more choices for domestic wood coating manufacturers. Among them, soybean oil and fatty acid modified varieties have quickly become the main varieties of short oil alkyd resins for wood coatings due to their good comprehensive performance and cost-effectiveness; In addition to its rapid development in architectural coatings, acrylic resin has also begun industrial application in environmentally friendly coatings such as high solid content, water solubility, water dispersibility, and powders in recent years.
With the large-scale development of industries such as furniture, automobiles, aluminum coils, plastics, etc., most enterprises operate on assembly lines, and the supporting coatings need to dry faster. Currently, domestic coating products cannot balance fast drying and adhesion, and there is still a certain gap compared to foreign products such as Europe, America, Japan, and South Korea. Good surface decoration effect, fast drying, adhesion, high hardness, high scratch resistance, heat resistance, and durability will become the research and development focus of coating resins in the future.