Plant-based fibers for paints
Reducing micro cracks and mudcracking
Paints – they are everywhere and most of us have worked with them already.
It has certainly cost some people more work, effort and nerves than they thought. During and after painting.
One main reason is the quality of the paint.
Our ARBOCEL® natural fibers can help to improve the quality and to solve problems.
A frequent problem in paints is mudcracking or microcracks. The reasons can be versatile e.g. too fast drying, substratum, etc.
Natural cellulose fibers, in paints commonly used in fiber length from approx. 10 microns to 120 microns act in different ways.
Coming from nature they have a kind of uneven surface with small fibrils and also they are flexible and not stiff.
Reinforcement and viscosity
With these properties, the cellulose fibers can build a 3-dimensional fiber network, which is reinforcing and helps mechanically to reduce cracks. However, the fiber network offers more than just reinforcement. It also provides a thixotropic behaviour that can improve the handling in general and e.g. to adjust viscosity:
System at rest
Fiber structure created by ARBOCEL®
System in motion
• Collapsed fiber structure
• Fibers align in the flow direction
• Fibers release some of the liquid into the matrix
• Decrease of viscosity
System at rest
As soon as shear forces stop acting on the system, the state shown in the first figure is restored.
But this are still not all advantages …
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