Development of combinatorial chemistry methods for coatings: high-throughput screening of abrasion resistance of coatings libraries.

Design, validation, and implementation of an optical spectroscopic system for high-throughput analysis of combinatorially developed protective organic coatings are reported. Our approach replaces labor-intensive coating evaluation steps with an automated system that rapidly analyzes 8 x 6 arrays of coating elements that are discretely deposited on a single plastic substrate. Each coating element of the library is 10 mm in diameter and 2-5 microm thick. Performance of coatings is evaluated with respect to their resistance to wear abrasion because this parameter is one of the primary considerations in end-use applications. Upon testing, the coating materials undergo changes that are impossible to quantitatively predict using existing knowledge. Coatings are abraded using industry-accepted abrasion test methods at a single or multiple abrasion conditions followed by the high-throughput analysis of abrasion-induced light scatter. The developed automated system is optimized for the analysis of diffusively scattered light that corresponds to 0-30% haze. System precision of 0.1-2.5% relative standard deviation provides capability for the reliable ranking of coatings performance. Although the system was implemented for high-throughput screening of combinatorially developed organic protective coatings for automotive applications, it can be applied for a variety of other applications for which materials ranking can be achieved using optical spectroscopic tools.

Development of combinatorial chemistry methods for coatings: high-throughput adhesion evaluation and scale-up of combinatorial leads.

Coupling of combinatorial chemistry methods with high-throughput (HT) performance testing and measurements of resulting properties has provided a powerful set of tools for the 10-fold accelerated discovery of new high-performance coating materials for automotive applications. Our approach replaces labor-intensive steps with automated systems for evaluation of adhesion of 8 x 6 arrays of coating elements that are discretely deposited on a single 9 x 12 cm plastic substrate. Performance of coatings is evaluated with respect to their resistance to adhesion loss, because this parameter is one of the primary considerations in end-use automotive applications. Our HT adhesion evaluation provides previously unavailable capabilities of high speed and reproducibility of testing by using a robotic automation, an expanded range of types of tested coatings by using the coating tagging strategy, and an improved quantitation by using high signal-to-noise automatic imaging. Upon testing, the coatings undergo changes that are impossible to quantitatively predict using existing knowledge. Using our HT methodology, we have developed several coatings leads. These HT screening results for the best coating compositions have been validated on the traditional scales of coating formulation and adhesion loss testing. These validation results have confirmed the superb performance of combinatorially developed coatings over conventional coatings on the traditional scale.