Coating Place evolved from the research environment of the University of  Wisconsin and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. The spirit of that research effort remains with the company today. Our overall research focuses on two areas: coating formulation development and new or improved coating process technology. Our current research efforts are primarily a collaborative, application-oriented effort with our customers in the area of formulation development and scale-up work. Optimal coatings are developed from a combination or balance of coating formulation, coating thickness or percentage, coating uniformity and processing parameters.

Formulation development begins by identifying the problem or reason that a coating may be required. If a coating application is determined to be a viable solution to the problem, we identify the technology that is best suited to provide the coating. Factors such as the form or derivative of the core material that may be best suited to application, particle size, cost factors, and production capacity requirements are considered in this evaluation. All coating technologies are considered in this evaluation phase.

If the Wurster technology is determined to be appropriate for the coating application, the desired properties of a coated product are defined and options to achieve these properties are identified. These options include consideration of coating materials, the formulation of these materials, and processing requirements. Optimization of a coating may involve a balance of function and cost rather than function alone. Aqueous- vs. solvent-based approaches will be considered if it is important in the application. For more complex needs, more than one component may make up a coating layer and more than one layer may be necessary to achieve the desired function or functions. More than one formulation approach may provide similar coating properties.

Coating experiments can be defined once the coating formulations targeted for study have been identified. The experiments are typically designed to study the key parameters of the application. These parameters may include layer thickness, process temperatures, feed rate, drying time, solvent selection, or other items. These parameters may be studied for more than one formulation.

Coated materials may be tested at the time of the coating work or in more extensive field or laboratory experiments carried out by our customer. Sufficient material is carried through the experiments to allow proper evaluation of the applied coat. Success or failure is used to identify the optimum coating for the application or define additional experiments.

Coating development work may involve scale-up of research work to production scale. The effort required in scale-up depends on customer and application requirements. Process conditions that were defined in the initial research work are scaled to a production scale.  In addition to this aspect of scale-up, process validation may be necessary depending on the customer needs. Process validation verifies and ensures product consistency.

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