Conservation of Energy

We will all be a lot better off in the industrial coatings world – longer performance, cleaner environment, healthier workers, and more profits/savings – when we truly embrace our work as a manufacturing process.  Cleaning (blasting) and painting is an energy intensive process. We overkill with air pressure and tons of abrasive (and paint over spray) in order to ensure we have to make as few passes as possible to meet the spec.  Air, paint, and grit are cheap compared to access and labor, so this approach is at least rational, if not efficient.

We’ve designed our equipment and our job logistics to accommodate this brute force approach, and most of the time, it gets the job done. But in the world in which I function (tech development and transfer), we are always looking to do things better, faster, safer, cheaper.  For the most part, we continue to hit the wall in the areas of coatings development, waiting for the next revolutionary materials breakthrough. Likewise, in access, containment and waste management, we have flattened out after the great advances driven by the lead paint efforts of the 90’s.  In surface prep, innovation has come in niches like UHP water, sponge, and water/grit combinations. All of these engineering accomplishments have moved the chains, but, honestly, have stalled out in the red zone.  Most of the time we are kicking field goals in our tech development efforts.

In order to improve our efficiency, we need to embrace process control. We need to KNOW what result we will get on the first pass of the nozzle or gun on the work piece AND know that that result is the same as the result on the last pass.  This must be accomplished through the development and use of DATA. The blaster has to know that with his particular gear, with the job-site setup, with the abrasive in the pot, on the type of steel, he/ she will meet the spec (or, more likely do far better than the spec requires). He/ she also has to know the relative effect of each of those major variables if they change. What variables can be compensated and keep the job moving? What changes mandate adjustment on the fly and which mandate a shutdown and reset? 

For the most part, only small bits of this type of data exist, but it is not beyond our collective capability to generate (or simply collect) it, synthesize it, and put it in a form where it can be used, built upon and improved over time. This is not QA data – which we spent A LOT of money collecting now – it is process control data. Data that is needed before the work is done so that the work doesn’t ever have to be redone.

Coatings and Risk

Traditionally (and presently) the engineering and design of industrial protective coating systems is focused on COST – it should be focused almost solely on RISK MITIGATION.  Too often we (begrudgingly) apply paint to an engineered structure because we “have to”. This continued approach will always get us to a place just short of our expanding expectations. 

Protective coating systems have evolved to a high performance place over the past 20 years. Materials have been formulated and tested and quality controlled to wring out to last 5% of theoretical performance potential. In fact, the testing and research business that I’ve spent my life in has (almost) rendered itself obsolete in my opinion.  Don’t get me wrong – there will always be a long list of poor performing products on the market – and there will always be people willing to sell those products to you (at a slightly reduced price), and outrageous performance claims are part of the industry’s charm – but with a reasonably targeted screening program (e.g., testing or paying close attention to experience) picking a good, high performance paint is not that hard anymore.

The tricky part comes when actually looking at coatings applications from an engineering standpoint. Specifically when risk of coating failure, or risk of unintended negative consequences on the operation of the structure or facility is considered as the primary driver for material selection.  Whereas the vast majority of research and testing of coatings over the years has been pointed toward torture test performance in kind of a chili cookoff type approach, a more sophisticated coating selection protocol will often be required for more challenging applications. This selection criteria may to lean more heavily on factors such as cure to service time under a broad band of environmental conditions, fast return-to-service in turnaround scenarios, compatibility with adjacent materials and exposures, ability to be mixed and applied under very challenging conditions and access, and (the yet to be found Holy Grail) ability to perform well over less than ideal surface preparation.

These points are not really news to producers and sellers of high performance coatings, as their customers have been demanding in presenting for these challenges for many years, but for the specifiers, testers, and coatings qualifying crowd (my people), I think a wake up call is necessary.  Very few of our specifications and test protocols emphasize these ancillary (really PRIMARY) requirements. We tend to lean on old school accelerated torture tests, look at the worst possible coating breakdown scenario on simple, flat panels exposed in fairly simplistic tests and make our top 5 lists.  These testing efforts rarely do what they should, which is examine the risks of a particular application; construct a risk chart of probability and consequences of a particular coating failure might be, and proceed from the bottom up to find materials which (although possibly not the best ultimate performers) minimize those risky scenarios. That’s engineering. We have a long way to go, and basically, I blame the chemists.

Diminishing Returns

The industrial coatings industry has come a long way over the past 20 years.  The methods we use to protect steel structures from the environment (both natural and man-made) are MUCH more effective, if not a lot more expensive than the days of picks and blast pots.  The choices of protective coating materials and complex methods of structure access, and personnel and environmental protection have morphed job specifications into documents with a lot of engineering behind them.

All of this progress is laudable and should continue to be refined to make our new better, safer, more efficient practices standard so that the baseline expected performance for a new paint job is raised across the board.  But my sense is that in several key areas, we, as a community, have hit the point of diminishing returns for our well-intended efforts.

Coating materials are certainly better and more consistent overall as reformulation to meet environmental and job efficiency goals have resulted in clever formulations which go on with little to no wasted solvent volume, dry faster and perform better long term in the harsh environment.  Containments and ventilation of work spaces has created mobile workareas which are safer for workers, more accessible and visible – resulting in quality benefits.

And, not to be forgotten, the industry has embraced a more aggressive stance toward jobsite quality assurance, conducted by independent and well-trained experts so that quality and consistency are valued job to job. 

But in all of these areas, there have been few, if any, real revolutionary innovations over the past 10 years.  Achieving quality has been a long, incremental journey – one worth taking – but one based on arguments of “life cycle cost savings” and blind faith in accelerated test data and consensus certification programs.  All of these efforts are “righteous” but none of them have a big upside to revolutionizing the way we do business or the results we obtain in terms of performance.

To get “there” we are going to have to change our thinking, and the thinking of the managers and owners of our structures.  We need to adopt an approach that treats the protective coating system on a structure as a manufacturing process – design, standard (or even mechanize) manufacturing process, and institutionalize quality checks.  Our brethren in the coating of OEM products (washing machines, automobiles) have embraced this philosophy years ago and now coating failure and breakdown are NEVER an issue that affects the lifecycle of one of their products.