The Application Of The Surfactant Adsorptions In The Polymer Emulsion In The Waterborne Paint

The development trend of water borne deco paint in the21th century is focused on the environment-friendly paint. The regulations of different country of Euro and USA mainly limit the Voc (volatilization of organic content) level and restrict the use of APEO-type surfactant as wetting agent in the paint formulations. Although in our country there are still no similar regulations or law published, yet it is consumer driven marketing as more and more consumer get the awareness of environment problems. Then that drives the paint manufacture and chemical suppliers to have the same standard as the west. So far in the paint marketing there are two topics which are also related to each others. One is APEO-replacement to develop new type surfactant to use in the paint formulations. The other is to reduce the solvent by using small amount of surfactant to absorb the emulsion solid phase to improve the freeze thaw resistance. And what the marketing is doing is just use the alkyd ethoxylates surfactants which have the similar HLB value as the APEO-type surfactant. The results are off course not ideal where the color acceptance is not as good as the paint which loads APEO-type surfactant. And also by using alkyl ethoxylates surfactant the paint formulations need more solvent to achieve low temperature stability. Though this article, it hope to build of the basic hydrophilic-hydrophobic molecular self assembly, absorption and competitive absorption at the surface of emulsion polymer with the performance of the paint. Through that it is to find the relations of surfactant structure with the paint properties to meet the paint development trends.