Anticipating change and understanding long term industry trends is key to meeting customer needs for marine coatings.
In these challenging times of high operational costs and reduced earnings, shipowners and operators must combine requirements for enhanced asset productivity, environmental compliance and reduced operating costs.
For PPG this is an opportunity to be grasped. The company has built up strong relationships with leading industry players to deliver coatings that meet their requirements for improved operational efficiency, measurable fuel savings and superior environmental performance.
PPG anticipated the trend of rising fuel costs and in response engineered its most advanced pure silicone fouling release system, PPG SIGMAGLIDE® 1290. This coating is formulated to help owners reduce the loss of speed and power due to fouling growth – and at the same time reduce greenhouse gas emissions – while delivering a coating that is free from biocides.
PPG SIGMAGLIDE 1290 is a fourth-generation, silicone fouling release coating and is completely biocide-free. As such it is unaffected by legislation such as the Biocidal Products Directive and it is tailored to comply with future environmental compliance programmes.
Its low environmental impact means that it can be applied onto the hull of a vessel trading in the most ecologically-delicate environments. Superior performance is achieved through a combination of film-forming properties and a very low average hull roughness, which result in market-leading fuel savings.
PPG SIGMAGLIDE 1290 utilizes dynamic surface regeneration technology to eliminate slime problems and dramatically reduce the loss of speed and power compared to existing fouling release products.
One of the well-known drawbacks of fouling release technologies is that their effectiveness decreases over time. This is often seen at the waterline where the impact of sunlight, dirt and UV radiation has a negative effect and leads to the aggregation of slime.
The coating has been engineered to include dynamic surface regeneration properties. These allow water to act as a catalyst to lower the surface energy of the coating back to its original state and thus restart its beneficial surface configuration properties.
This significantly extends the effectiveness of the coating and as a result, customers will experience no loss in performance and improved stability of the product throughout its lifetime. The combination of the 100% silicone binder fouling release system with the ability of the surface to dynamically regenerate makes the PPG SIGMAGLIDE 1290 coating a breakthrough technology for the marine coatings market.