High Build Polyurea Coatings
NCMS Project #: 140922
Problem: Corrosion is a persistent problem affecting nearly all infrastructure, vehicles, and equipment used for commercial and military applications. Metal exposed to moisture, salt spray, oxidation, or environmental or industrial chemicals must be continually protected, and that protection must be maintained, to prevent costly breakdown and failure of assets. A need exists for development of state-of-the-art chip and wear resistant coatings for demanding applications such as Army Bridging systems and other Army ground vehicle systems to reduce corrosion risk in high wear and impact areas.
Benefit: Durable coatings with improved wear and chip resistance will help maintain high readiness levels while lowering life cycle costs associated with maintenance. Polyurea coatings have been found to provide excellent durability and corrosion protection when used in a coating stack. These coatings would also benefit other industrial and commercial applications where durability is required, extending the lifetimes of metallic substrates.
Solution/Approach: Applying and maintaining critical protective coating stacks can be time consuming and costly. Each layer must be applied according to the requirements of the coating material, including allowing for sufficient time before application of subsequent layers. Removing previously-applied coatings is frequently very difficult. Ideally, damaged coatings would be able to be repaired, minimizing the amount of removal and reapplication necessary, but for such a solution to be viable, the performance of a repaired coating must be equivalent to that of the original coating stack.
The project will investigate high build polyurea coatings. Prototype(s) developed in the project will be CARC system stackups with a polyurea intermediate layer (e.g., pretreatment-primer-polyurea-topcoat) or a polyurea topcoat (e.g., pretreatment-primer-polyurea) on representative substrates to be used to comparatively test polyurea coating systems versus other existing chip and wear resistant technologies.
Impact on Warfighter:
- Improve durability of coating stacks
- Reduce maintenance and costs
- Improve safety
- Improve longevity of critical equipment
DOD Participation:
- U.S. Army TARDEC
Industry Participation:
- PPG Industries, Inc.
- NCMS
Benefit Area(s):
- Costs savings
- Maintenance avoidance and reliability
- Reliability improvement
Focus Area:
- Reliability improvement