Conducting Thermosetting Polymers for Composite Coatings

这笔Engage赠款将启动Elcora先进材料公司(新斯科舍省哈利法克斯)和迈克尔·弗洛因德博士(达尔豪西大学化学)之间的合作。Elcora是高质量碳材料的生产商，特别是石墨和石墨烯，并已将防腐涂料确定为其材料的重要未来应用。到2022年，全球防腐涂料市场预计将达到266.27亿美元，最近出现了石墨烯，作为当前含有有毒化合物的涂料的有吸引力的替代品，Elcora处于开发新的加拿大制造涂料的理想地位，并显著扩大了他们的客户基础。然而，由于在涂料方面的经验有限，开发新知识产权以生产产品的机会有限，Elcora无法进入市场。弗洛因德博士的团队在材料和聚合物科学领域拥有20多年的经验，包括防腐涂料的合成和表征。他的团队开发了新的热固性共轭聚合物，可以与Elcora先进材料公司生产的纳米片状石墨和石墨烯结合，生成具有防腐性能的新型高性能涂料。Elcora的工程师和Freund博士团队的研究人员开发了配方和涂层方法，这将为Elcora先进材料产生一个新的产品线。弗洛因德博士团队对薄膜的表征将提供将这种新涂层推向各种行业所需的性能指标。

This Engage grant will initiate a collaboration between Elcora Advanced Materials (Halifax, Nova Scotia) and Dr. Michael Freund (Chemistry, Dalhousie University). Elcora is a producer of high-quality carbon materials - specifically graphite and graphene - and has identified anticorrosion coatings as an important future application for their materials. The global anti-corrosion coating market is expected to reach $26,627 million by 2022 and with the recent emergence of graphene as an attractive replacement to current coatings that contain toxic compounds, Elcora is ideally positioned to develop new, made in Canada, coatings and significantly expand their customer base. However, with limited experience in coatings and limited opportunity to develop new intellectual property to generate products, Elcora is unable to enter the market. Dr. Freund's group has over two decades of experience in the field of material and polymer science including the synthesis and characterization of anticorrosion coatings. His group has developed new thermosetting conjugated polymers that can be combined with nano-platelet graphite and graphene produced by Elcora Advanced Materials to generate new, high-performance coatings with anticorrosion properties. Elcora engineers and researchers in Dr. Freund's group develop formulations and coating methods that will generate a new product line for Elcora Advanced Materials. Characterization of the films in Dr. Freund's group will provide performance metrics required to market the new coating for various industries.