MAKING AND FINDING SOLUTIONS


PERFECT BEAM


Kynar coating has been around for 50 years, and part of the durability of the brand as well as the coating itself is that technicians, such as this one, can measure its dimensions with laser precision so that when a sky- scraper’s Kynar-coated metal cladding goes onto a building, it stays colorfast, and impervious to weather, sun, chemicals and pollutants.


You now see LEDs in taillights of automobiles, in your houses—they’re everywhere, and it’s a high-growth market. And so the platform was optics around manipulation of light in Plexiglas. And we find that spawns a lot of products addressing customer opportunities and challenges in the lighting industry, the display industry, the taillight industry and some other industries that would take me a lot more words to describe to you.


example is a fuel line. At the end of the day, we’re not going to make the fuel line, but I find it very important that we’re able to actually extrude complicated, multilayer tubing and test its properties in order to approach our tubing custom- ers with formulations and processing conditions. We want to know as much about how our products will perform in the application as our customers— even more, if possible. So if they have a failure—I think this would be interest- ing for the Army, actually—we find it’s very important to have fully integrated R&D capability. If there’s a failure in a test or qualification, we want to be able to have an answer for that, to be able to say, “Well, it probably failed because the process conditions were too high or too low, or too this or that.”


We’ve got reams of data. You can imag- ine for things like skyscrapers, you need to have long-term weathering, samples


82 Army AL&T Magazine July-September 2015


sitting out in the sun in various regions in the world for decades in order to demonstrate capillary tension on the weatherability of this stuff.


Army AL&T: Kynar is 50 years old and by all accounts a great product. Can you tell us anything about its development that would give us insight into how the original requirements might have evolved over the years? Or have they?


Dirkx: Tis may not be the best example for this question, in that it is often consid- ered the benchmark in its applications and competitive products are trying to meet the performance targets set by Kynar. Tat being said, there are some require- ments that have driven product changes over the years. One example would be the local VOC [volatile organic compounds] requirements that drove us to develop solutions that allowed our customers to meet the more restrictive regulations.


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