Efficient and faster time-to-market using Hansen Solubility Parameters

Presented by Frank Ruttens, Agfa-Labs

Agfa-Labs is the open innovation platform of Agfa Gevaert NV for materials and coatings research. Under the name of Agfa-Labs, which is “the laboratories of Agfa”, we are offering our R&D-services to third parties. These services tap into an experience of more than 100 years in innovative product development of anorganic formulations and coatings in different material contexts.

In the particular case of the development of ink jet systems for wide format printing, Agfa has been able to commercialize its 4-color set of UV-curable inks in less than 2 years time. This was only possible using advanced research tools as High Throughput Formulation, High Throughput Screening and … the use of Hansen Solubility Parameters (HSP)!

The “lessons learned” from Dr. Hansen’s theory turned out to be very valuable for other products that were under development : printing plates, radiology cassettes, conductive inks… Soon the number of internal research issues that could be solved by using HSP increased in a spectacular way.

Triggered by the success of this intriguing tool, I started a literature study on possible applications in various industrial activity fields. The result was astonishing : not only the coating industry, Agfa’s key domain, benefits by the use of HSP! In the more than 500 articles and abstracts almost every kind of industrial activity was represented : chemistry and petrochemistry, pharmaceutical as well as cosmetic’s industry, nanotechnology, plastics and polymer processing, green designer solvents for micro-reactors, barrier layers and membranes, biological materials and tissues, energy, textile, electronics… The most amazing application that I found is in the field of aroma’s, flavours and fragrances!

In this presentation I would like to disclose to the members of the conference the diversity and the multi-applicability of HSP!