Coating and adhesive manufacturers are under pressure: They compete for market share, optimize their
products in rapid succession, and must focus on efficiency while ensuring sustainability and regulatory
compliance. At the same time, products need to become increasingly circular – without compromising
the properties of a coating or adhesive. A critical factor in all of this: The right binders and crosslinkers.
Their development takes place at material manufacturers like Covestro. The German company is now
addressing these requirements by announcing that in the course of 2025, it will open a specifically
developed, automated laboratory for optimizing coating and adhesive formulations to provide even
better support to its customers.
“With our automated laboratory, we can work together with our customers on the future of coatings
and adhesives. Because it operates almost completely autonomously and learns from our existing
knowledge and data lake as well as newly generated data, it makes the process of optimizing and
developing formulations many times more efficient and precise. This allows us to optimize existing
formulations faster or even develop completely new formulations for and together with our customers.
We can say: We are reaching a new level of modern research,” says Thomas Büsgen, head of the
laboratory.
Specifically, the new laboratory will test formulations with Covestro binders and crosslinkers for coatings
and adhesives. Their clever selection ensures properties such as hardness, adhesion, opacity, gloss, or
durability. Such formulations typically consist of seven to 15 components, whose combination
determines the properties of the final product. The resulting high number of possible combinations
means that standard formulations are usually used. The new laboratory now enables more extensive
test series, also thanks to the computer-aided design of test series and the use of automation.