Bring paint to a 'liquid state'?

[Grouse]

moral of the story, next time your next to a nissan.... drill 1 cm holes 1 foot a part and stick dowels in them..:P I kid i kid

Ice glaciers are viscous, just as glass is viscous. have you ever seen a warbly window from 50-100 years of age? That is the glass moving.

anywho. I can see how you could claim paint being viscous, but i have no proof or knowledge to it being that way.

[Scottwax]

Originally Posted by Grouse

i take it that is a industry magizine?

Can you provide a bit more info?

www.carwash.com

You can get the magazine free, not sure where exactly the link is on the site though.

[Bence]

Originally Posted by Grouse

moral of the story, next time your next to a nissan.... drill 1 cm holes 1 foot a part and stick dowels in them..:P I kid i kid.

Aaron,

Gooood one!!!

[Grouse]

BMW thinks you'll take a shine to this

Car wash
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09 June 2006

Paul Gover

The car you never have to polish is on the way. It promises to be a boon for anyone who has to battle the bucket for weekend car-wash duties in drought conditions.

BMW is working hard on a matt finish paint that will end the drudgery and could rewrite the rules on car styling and presentation.

It made the first move with its M Coupe concept at the Frankfurt Motor Show last year and, after a lot of interest from potential customers, is fast-tracking development of the new paint.

BMW says it wants to be first but has to overcome many problems, from applying the paint in factories to preserving it against everything from sap and tar to fingerprints.

"Surfaces on the vehicle turn to sculpture with this paint," Z4 Coupe project manager Timo Gobel says.

He gave the update at the preview of the Z4 Coupe in Portugal. BMW displayed a bodyshell with the same matt finish as the Frankfurt car.

"It is a big technical challenge," Gobel says. "There are many changes necessary, from the factory paintshop to caring for the finish.

"We have no idea yet on how we will be able to repair it."

He says research is moving into testing on everything from durability to protecting the paint without detracting from the matt finish.

"It will be some time before this paint is available," Gobel says.

The Z4 Coupe comes in another big year for BMW, which already has the Z4 M Roadster on sale in Australia and will have the latest 3-Series Coupe in showrooms before the end of the year.

It ran a full-scale media driving program for the red-hot M Coupe model, including laps at the Estoril circuit once used for Formula One.

It also showed the "civilian" 3.0si model, though there was no car for road-testing and the display model was customised to highlight the choices available from BMW's Individual division.

Both cars will be available in Australia about September, with the si model less than $100,000 and the Z4 M Coupe about $125,000.

Herald-Sun

[wannafbody]

anyone else skeptical of the MING claims?

[the other pc]

Originally Posted by Grouse

... I can see how you could claim paint being viscous, but i have no proof or knowledge to it being that way.

Current paints aren't. It's claimed that these new self healing paints are.

Nissan's coatings are produced by Nippon Paint and while they've been happy to tell us how wonderful it will be they haven't been too clear on how it works.

Bayer in Germany is also working on self-healing coatings. By formulating the finish with a low glass transition temperature (the temperature at which a solid polymer will start to behave like glass, a viscous non-crystalline amorphous solid) the scratches will tend to flow out when warm.

Of course it's a balancing act of making the coating flow when you want it to but not when you don't.

Then there are other issues to contend with. Bayer says the self-healing works for scratches caused by plastic deformation of the surface, when the molecules in the matrix are displaced but bonds aren't broken. Apparently it doesn't work for scratches caused by brittle fracture, breaking of the intermolecular bonds. So the coating has to both flow and yet resist fracture under normal use. That's got to be tricky to do.


PC.

[Slickery]

Originally Posted by wannafbody

anyone else skeptical of the MING claims?

Ringmaster? lol

[foxtrapper]

The notion of using frictional heat to semi-melt a coating and moving it around is valid and has been in use for centuries. Varnish would be the old classic. Many a novice with a rotary buffer has first hand experience at this with automotive paints, albet unpleasant experience.

I find the claim of doing this without any marring to be highly suspicious. Perhaps possible with single stage paints. But with clearcoats and the like, I doubt it could be done in an attractive fashion.

[Bence]

Good that the other pc brought up Bayer. Read on!


SELF-HEALING AUTOMOTIVE COATING


Scratches on a car put a damper on the driver’s pleasure and reduce gloss. Bayer researchers have developed a new coating that repairs small blemishes itself and is also especially environment-friendly.

Every car owner wants his or her vehicle to have a glossy, shiny surface. But the shine fades a little with each new scratch. Such minimal abrasions occur during washing, for example, whether the car is washed by hand or in the car wash. All it takes are tiny particles of dirt on the sponge or brush and, after a few short years, the once glossy car looks as if it had been scrubbed with steel wool. The problem could soon be a thing of the past, however. Dr. Markus Mechtel and the research team at Bayer MaterialScience Coatings have now developed coating raw materials for the formulation of clearcoats that can heal these “wounds”: small scratches simply disappear.
The magic formula: “2K-PUR Clear Coat, plasticized and highly crosslinked”, an extremely resistant and easy-flowing polyurethane mixture comprising the polyisocyanate Desmodur® and the polyol Desmophen®. When the PU coating is slightly heated – and all it takes is sunshine on a summer day – small blemishes on the car’s sheet metal simply flow back together.


Less solvent thanks to new PU components in the coating

But the new Bayer coating doesn’t just have amazing “self-healing powers”, it is also environmentally friendly. The components used in the PU coating are significantly less viscous than those typically used before. This means that the automakers do not have to use as much solvent, which in turn benefits the environment.
The scratch resistance of a coating is almost entirely a function of the topmost transparent layer, which is only a few hundredths of a millimeter thick and protects the layers below. The demands placed on this outer skin are enormous. Not only should it be scratch-resistant, it also has to withstand aggressive chemical compounds such as salt water, tree sap and bird droppings – and all of this at extreme temperatures ranging from plus 70 to minus 30 degrees Celsius while subjected to UV radiation and high humidity. Conventional coatings fail in that it is difficult to combine chemical resistance and high scratch resistance in one coating. Many coating raw materials in the Bayer testing laboratory fail early on in testing for this same reason when subjected to the laboratory car wash and weathering unit.
Wash brushes bearing quartz sand rotate above coated sheet metal and 6,000 Watt xenon lamps simulate extremely intense sunshine at up to 100 percent humidity – all in the presence of an aggressive acid mixture. Because the Bayer researchers carefully modified the surface coating’s “inner values”, the new PU coating literally came through this torture shining.


Scratches simply disappear in just a few minutes

“The self-healing ability of the coating is attributable to the density of its molecules and its glass transition temperature,” says Thomas Klimmasch, head of the automotive coatings lab at Bayer MaterialScience. The glass transition temperature is a transition point below which the network of coating molecules hardens like glass and can no longer move. At higher temperatures, the network of polymer chains is elastic and can flex in response to mechanical loads.The lower the glass transition temperature, the better the flow behavior and thus the self-healing ability of the coating. With highly flexible coatings, scratches appear as fine depressions that flow together in just a few minutes – more or less right before the eyes of the observer. A low glass transition temperature also has its disadvantages: both its resistance to chemicals and its polishability decrease. The coating becomes too soft to buff.
“A glass transition temperature of between 50 and 60 degrees Celsius has proven to be ideal,” says Mechtel.
With some coatings, mechanical loads such as those that occur due to brush impacts in a car wash result in irreversible surface damage in the form of fine brittle fractures. Such scratches do not heal themselves even at high temperatures. To make the coating even more resistant, the researchers increased the network density, tightening the molecular network. “This normally makes the material harder and more brittle,” explains Mechtel.
The first scratches only occur at higher loads but brittle fractures occur much, much sooner. The researchers’ goal was therefore to increase the density of the network while keeping the glass transition temperature constant. They made very specific changes to the composition of the raw material components. The result: the coating is better protected against not only plastic deformation but also brittle fracture.
What does this mean for car owners?
Fewer scratches occur in the car wash and those that do are small, self-healing blemishes. “With longer heat phases, residual gloss can recover from 70 to 80 percent back up to 90 percent,” says Mechtel. The researchers are now working on making the scratches disappear in cold weather and not just during the summer.


Coating in motion

The scratch resistance of coatings is tested using the “nanoscratch” method. A very fine metal tip is drawn with increasing pressure over the surface. At very high pressure, the transition occurs between plastic deformation and brittle fracture. This transition is then visualized using optical or atomic force microscopy.


Plastic deformation

Deformation scratches are no problem for the new coating. At high temperatures, sunshine causes the coating to flow into the scratch, largely returning the surface to its original smooth state.


Source: Bayer Research

[Grouse]

This is going to suck for bug bits stuck in the front of the car.

[theveed]

Originally Posted by Grouse

BMW thinks you'll take a shine to this

Car wash
Soap opera: car washing could be a lot different in the future.
Other Top stories

* Mighty Murano makeover
* Ford and Holden's turbo hatches compared
* Astra's split personality
* Fuels of the future on display at world forum

09 June 2006

Paul Gover

The car you never have to polish is on the way. It promises to be a boon for anyone who has to battle the bucket for weekend car-wash duties in drought conditions.

BMW is working hard on a matt finish paint that will end the drudgery and could rewrite the rules on car styling and presentation.

It made the first move with its M Coupe concept at the Frankfurt Motor Show last year and, after a lot of interest from potential customers, is fast-tracking development of the new paint.

BMW says it wants to be first but has to overcome many problems, from applying the paint in factories to preserving it against everything from sap and tar to fingerprints.

"Surfaces on the vehicle turn to sculpture with this paint," Z4 Coupe project manager Timo Gobel says.

He gave the update at the preview of the Z4 Coupe in Portugal. BMW displayed a bodyshell with the same matt finish as the Frankfurt car.

"It is a big technical challenge," Gobel says. "There are many changes necessary, from the factory paintshop to caring for the finish.

"We have no idea yet on how we will be able to repair it."

He says research is moving into testing on everything from durability to protecting the paint without detracting from the matt finish.

"It will be some time before this paint is available," Gobel says.

The Z4 Coupe comes in another big year for BMW, which already has the Z4 M Roadster on sale in Australia and will have the latest 3-Series Coupe in showrooms before the end of the year.

It ran a full-scale media driving program for the red-hot M Coupe model, including laps at the Estoril circuit once used for Formula One.

It also showed the "civilian" 3.0si model, though there was no car for road-testing and the display model was customised to highlight the choices available from BMW's Individual division.

Both cars will be available in Australia about September, with the si model less than $100,000 and the Z4 M Coupe about $125,000.

Herald-Sun

I would expect a publishing firm like the Herald knows how to spell MATTE... geez...

[Bence]

Oooh, such minor annoyances...!!!