High Shear Mixing In Paint Making

by Christine Angos, Application Engineer, Charles Ross & Son Co.

Paints and coatings as we know them today have come a long way
from what early man used in sketchy cave wall murals. When before they
were merely used to depict and represent life, they now perform more active
roles in making life better and of course, more colorful.
To date, countless compounds have been formulated to fulfill varied
and unique requirements of thousands of applications. In its modern usage,
"paint" ranges from the broad group of environmentally-sound latex paints that
consumers use to decorate and protect their homes, and the translucent
coatings that line the interior of food containers, to the chemically-complex,
multi-component finishes that automobile manufacturers apply on the
assembly line.
Diverse as they are, these products share a very fundamental thing in
common: at the heart of the unit operations involved in manufacturing all kinds
of paints is good old mechanical mixing. Whatever their final destination,
these solutions undergo mixing of raw materials and much of product
performance is decided in this step. In the case of ink, some experts volunteer
that proper mechanical mixing can increase color strength and opacity by as
much as 20%.

Lets Paint a History

Over the decades, paint mixing techniques saw many changes, each
one leading to a more efficient way of breaking down pigment agglomerates
and dispersing solids into a homogenous mixture. Stone mills, ball mills and
roller mills have been used extensively in this industry. While these machines
can effectively grind particles into finer sizes, production time is very slow,
often taking 24 hours to get a smooth batch.

In later years, when pigments were commercially sold in smaller

crystals, paints no longer needed intensive grinding. Still, the ability to reduce
pigment agglomerate size to less than a micron remains critical for success to
some applications.

The development of the high speed disperser

(HSD) blade, a thin disk lined with carefully designed
saw teeth, paved the way to faster processing of paints
and coatings. Used in conjunction with media mills or
three roll mills, the HSD is now the industrys basic tool.
Pre-mixes or base solutions are prepared using single
blade HSDs and when necessary, further fine-tuning of
product consistency is done on mills. This two-step
process is widespread in most paint-producing plants of
today.

High Speed Disperser Blade

Going High Shear

While the HSD-media mill tandem does a good job of mixing paints
with reasonable efficiency, some applications require special processing. A
saw-toothed HSD blade may produce a solution that looks uniform and welldispersed, but a look under the microscope could reveal otherwise. The
emulsion produced is sometimes unstable, and one phase soon separates. In
most cases where the HSD is able to achieve a sufficiently small droplet size,
that success comes only at the cost of excessive heat build-up, and an
unnecessarily long and costly mix cycle.

In emulsion applications involving such materials as epoxies, silicone

polymers, acrylics and urethanes, this failure can be averted with a batch-type
high shear mixer (HSM) with a rotor/stator design. As the rotating blades pass
each opening in the stator, materials are expelled at high velocity into the
surrounding mix. Combining mechanical and hydraulic shear, the rotor/stator
can quickly reduce droplet size to the submicron range. For non-shear-

sensitive formulations, a 400-mesh fine screen stator will accelerate this

process producing superior dispersions in a fraction of the time.

The importance of high shear mixing extends to replacing the milling

step in the preparation of low-viscosity paints and coatings. When pre-mixing
easily dispersed materials like calcium carbonate, talc and titanium dioxide, a
high-speed disperser can wet out the solids. This pre-mix can then pass
through an inline high shear mixer and flow directly into a let-down tank
downstream. Here, the high shear mixer functions both as a pump and a
mixer, substituting for a mill. Again, throughput is significantly increased.

Fine Screen Head High Shear Mixer

Inline high shear mixer

Pre-mixing vs. Back-milling

The coatings maker who focuses on premixing instead of back-milling

can often reduce overall process and capital costs, as well as increase
production efficiency, time- and energy-wise. Ultimately, throughput is
determined by these two processes working together in balance. When
looking to improve throughput or reduce processing cost, investment in
greater milling capacity is not always the answer. High-viscosity vacuum premixing can return a larger dividend in productivity than a comparable
investment in downstream milling. An analysis of his or her entire process will
help the manufacturer determine which requirements improved pre-mixing
can achieve more practically than enhanced (but costlier) back-milling.

Challenging Tradition
The physical and chemical properties of paints, through which they add
value to products, depend highly on an efficient mixing strategy. Many coating
defects such as cratering, crawling, dewetting, fish-eyes, flooding, floating,
haze, kick-out and seeds, are avoided through proper dispersion.

Paint making is an old business running virtually no risk of dying out.

Every so often, it gives birth to new kinds of compounds which have never
been used or even needed before. The reality is that many of these fresh
formulations still rely on old mixing technologies which limit the properties of
the paint and inhibit production efficiency itself.

A good review of new process methods and techniques would not hurt
the paint manufacturer. There may be as many ways to skin the cat as there
are to mix things up.