Tuesday, March 8th, the NWSCT will host NDSU students and faculty for our annual Educational Symposium. 

The symposium will be held at Valspar R&D (312 South 11th Ave, Minneapolis, MN 55415) and will feature two speakers:  Dr. Victoria Johnston Gelling and Adlina Paramarta (student).  The cost for this meeting will be $15 per person and includes lunch.  If you are interested in attending please sign up and pay via PayPal on the NWSCT Website by Friday, March 4th.  If you wish to pay via cash or check the day of, please contact Rob Laubsher to RSVP via email rlaubscher@paints.com or phone (763-424-2044) by Friday, March 4th so that we can get an accurate head count for lunch.   We encourage everyone to invite your co-workers to join us for this meeting so we can have a very high attendance!   

Dr. Gelling is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Coatings and Polymeric Materials at North Dakota State University.  She obtained her B.S. degree in Chemistry from the University of North Dakota and her PhD in chemistry from NDSU.  Dr. Gelling's principal research interests are the use of electrochemistry to monitor the health and degradation of polymeric materials and the transitioning of laboratory electrochemical techniques to the field. 

The title of Dr. Gelling's talk will be "The Electrochemical Assessment of Coatings."

Historically, the assessment of corrosion and coating degradation has been primarily a visual science which lends itself to estimates of durability that tend to be qualitative in nature with the results varying depending on the person performing the assessment.  In order to overcome these inherent difficulties with visual assessment, the use of electrochemical techniques to investigate the durability, degradation, and subsequent corrosion of the substrate are becoming widely used throughout the coatings and materials field.  During the presentation, the use of electrochemical techniques, both local and global in nature, will be introduced with recent results from the research group given as examples.  The results from electrochemical assessment of electroactive conducting polymers and microencapsulated corrosion inhibitors were examined via multiple electrochemical techniques.  Finally, the possibility of using electrochemical techniques for guidance in formulating coatings will be discussed, as the techniques are sensitive to pigment volume concentration. (For a full abstract click here ). 

The second speaker will be Adlina Paramarta.  Adlina is an undergraduate student in the Coatings and Polymeric Materials program at NDSU and is currently conducting research with Dr. Dean Webster.  The title of Adlina's talk will be "Synthesis and Photopolymerization of Highly Functional Acrylated Biobased Resins."

The search for environmentally friendly and "greener" materials in the polymer field is further explored to decrease dependency toward petroleum-based products.  Sucrose soyate, a complex molecule of sucrose and fatty acids of soybean oils, provide an alternative renewable material for petroleum-based coating resins in addition to the already existing choice of drying oils.  In this research, the unsaturation of sucrose soyate was modified into acrylate functionality by means of epoxidation and acrylation process - these functional groups provide sites for the crosslinking polymerization through ultraviolet irradiation.  Mechanical and thermal properties of the coating formulations with different degrees of acrylation and various reactive diluents were evaluated.  All of the coatings produced were found to have a high crosslinking density which leads to excellent chemical resistance, high glass transition temperatures and hardness of the coatings.