In recent years, the construction machinery industry has achieved rapid development and environmental protection requirements have become increasingly strict. In this context, construction machinery manufacturers are paying more and more attention to water-based coatings, and the requirements for product performance and construction technology are increasing day by day.
Based on these considerations, Sany Heavy Machinery began to evaluate and test various low VOC (Volatile Organic Compound) coatings in 2014, and the final comprehensive indicators of waterborne coatings stood out. At present, 10 water-based coating production lines have been deployed in Kunshan Park. These water-based coating production lines have fully met the performance requirements of solvent-based coating, and will be further promoted in other factories of Sany Heavy Machinery in the future.
“Using water-based paint instead of solvent-based paint can reduce VOC emissions by more than 80%. Considering the complexity of water-based paint coating, we mainly choose domestic and foreign good paint suppliers and material suppliers to cooperate and support.” Qi Xiangan, director of the Machine Coating Research Institute, said.
“Engineering machinery and equipment are mainly open-air operation, so there are high requirements for anti-corrosion performance, appearance and gloss. Sherwin-Williams is committed to the development of new products for water-based and low-VOC coatings to meet various mechanical coating performance indicators. Working with upstream raw material suppliers to provide customers with solutions on coating performance, construction processes, and how to retrofit waterborne coating applications.” said Wu Zhonghua, General Manager of Sherwin General Industrial Coatings Asia.
In China, many engineering machinery manufacturing workshops still need to rely on manual spraying because they cannot control the temperature and humidity. This is a big challenge for waterborne coating construction. In response to this feature, Sherwin-Williams Coatings and Covestro's local R&D have developed the easy-to-spray waterborne two-component polyurethane coating technology to help China's engineering machinery coating industry achieve technological upgrading through more environmentally-friendly high-performance water-based coatings, meeting increasingly stringent Regulatory requirements.