Coating and adhesive manufacturers must compete for market share, optimize products quickly, and ensure efficiency, sustainability, and regulatory compliance. Covestro will open an automated laboratory in 2025 to enhance the development of binders and crosslinkers, supporting these needs.

"With our automated laboratory, we can work together with our customers on the future of coatings and adhesives. Because it operates almost completely autonomously and learns from our existing knowledge and data lake as well as newly generated data, it makes the process of optimizing and developing formulations many times more efficient and precise. This allows us to optimize existing formulations faster or even develop completely new formulations for and together with our customers. We can say: We are reaching a new level of modern research," says Thomas Büsgen, head of the laboratory.

The new laboratory will test formulations with Covestro binders and crosslinkers for coatings and adhesives, ensuring properties like hardness, adhesion, opacity, gloss, and durability. Typically consisting of seven to 15 components, these formulations usually rely on standard combinations. The new lab enables more extensive test series through computer-aided design and automation.

"Our new automated laboratory gives us more possibilities for testing formulations. It relieves our specialized laboratories of their standard tasks and can analyze samples more systematically. This allows us to focus our expertise and experience even more on customer-specific topics or try approaches we couldn't have implemented otherwise," says Martin Merkens, Head of Sales & Market Development EMLA in Covestro's Coatings and Adhesives business entity. “This will particularly help us in the area of circular economy: Alternative raw materials, for example bio-based or recycled materials, can be tested faster and evaluated for their properties in the final product.”

Covestro aims to run tens of thousands of tests annually, setting a new standard in number, variety, precision, and speed. The automated lab generates structured data, rapidly growing knowledge about formulations. Machine learning algorithms evaluate the data, improving formulations, while AI predicts and verifies new experiments, creating a self-learning system. The lab formulates water- and solvent-based 1K and 2K systems and performs material tests on raw materials, formulations, and applied films. Applications can occur in different climates to simulate product use. Digitalization enables easy forwarding of samples to specialized labs, supplementing datasets with market-specific test results and identifying dependencies more quickly.