Industry upheaval even changes coatings

The vehicle coatings business might look — on the surface — to be safe from the disruption roiling the auto industry. But the reality is quite different. Axalta Coating Systems of Philadephia, once a part of DuPont, faces many challenges as automakers adopt new materials to save weight and as the industry moves into unfamiliar new territory, says Axalta's chief technology officer, Barry Snyder. Snyder spoke with Staff Reporter Richard Truett about some of the ways vehicle coatings will change in the coming years. Here are edited excerpts.

Q: How are Axalta's r&d efforts growing as we enter the electrification and autonomous driving age?

A: Our r&d budget has grown over the past several years. If you look at our r&d investment today versus several years ago, we're probably up 15 to 20 percent.

R&d continues to be an important part of who we are and what we do. We continue to invest about 4 percent of sales into r&d. That differs a little bit based on business areas. We've pumped a lot into r&d infrastructure. We've built a number of labs around the world. We simplified and streamlined our approach to r&d, which should enable us to get more out of the r&d dollars we put in.

Are Axalta chemists considering materials that have never been used in the auto industry to create new coatings?

One of the things about the coatings business is the diversity of the layers of the material to build up a coating film on the outside of a car body. Each one is based on fundamentally different chemistry because of the performance requirements. We already buy and use thousands of different raw materials. Our palette is already pretty broad, so it's less about what completely new-to-the-world materials are we going to use, and more about what's the right tool to use to solve the problem. If you look at the diversity of pigments, it's how we optimize them to give different optical effects.

How are stricter environmental regulations affecting Axalta's r&d spend?

The transition to water-based paint is not done. There is still a large amount of solid-borne material being consumed worldwide. It's kind of interesting that while everybody thinks water is an inherently lower volatile solution, we have continued to push on some solvent-based materials to a point where we sell high solid or ultrahigh solid materials that perform really well and that are lower [volatile organic compounds] than water-borne systems. Reducing waste and overspray are also drivers for us.

New and different materials are being used for vehicle body parts. How does this affect the way Axalta develops coatings?

Our question is how we can enable our customers to change their materials of construction to get higher fuel mileage and lower emissions.

With plastics, we've got customers looking to introduce recycled content that changes the nature of the substrates. Building paint systems that adhere and still deliver the kind of protection that is needed, and look good over that new emerging mix of substrates, is probably where we spend even more energy and attention than anywhere else.

If you try to protect an all-steel vehicle, it's pretty straightforward. That corrosion protection has been around for a very long time. But migrate to an all-aluminum F-150: Aluminum corrodes a little differently than steel does. But it is still monolithic, all aluminum. Now move to a vehicle that includes different grades of steel, aluminum, magnesium and carbon fiber reinforced plastic. What you have is a jigsaw puzzle.

Each material corrodes differently and can interfere with the corrosion performance of each other. When you paint and put it in an oven, plastic doesn't expand that much. Aluminum expands more than anything. Steel expands a little bit. So it all kind of moves in the oven, and the paint film is moving while it is baking in the oven.

Future vehicles are expected to have dramatically higher usage rates, perhaps as much as 20 hours per day and 100,000 miles per year. Won't paint have to be far more durable for that?

That would affect things. But we haven't had anyone talk to us yet about million-mile durability.

Will autonomous vehicles require special coatings?

The question will be, "Can you see the paint?" We've been digging into this. This is stuff we're watching carefully. Certainly, there is a lot of sensor technology built into vehicles, and that is going to grow. What does it mean to embed radar technology in a bumper, to be transparent enough for the beam to go out and come back? What does it mean if we put in lidar, for it to sense the paint and it reflecting back?

Will the move to electric vehicles affect Axalta's business?

We sell coatings that go into electric motors. There are three coating materials that go into electric motors, and we sell those. It's a fairly unique coating. So EVs are a growth opportunity for us. m