New Specialty Resins for High Performance Fusion Bonded Epoxy Coatings

In the last decade, the evolution in the exploration and transportation of oil and gas as well as efforts to delay the effect of corrosion on strategic and valuable assets like pipelines, have triggered the development of new Fusion Bonded Epoxy (FBE) anticorrosion coatings. A major component in a FBE formulation are solid epoxy resins, which when properly formulated enable the FBE coating to reach higher performance requirements to cope with the ever more challenging conditions in the field. This paper describes how solid epoxy resins (SER) can help high glass transition temperature FBE coatings to protect pipelines operating at high service temperatures from corrosion. A second area of innovation is a solid epoxy resin that helps FBE to cure at lower application temperatures than standard FBE coatings while maintaining the similar corrosion performance. Damage tolerance is the third area of innovation. Dow Coating Materials has developed an epoxy/copolymer resin system which helps the FBE formulator overcome the brittleness of FBE Abrasion Resistance Overcoat (ARO) at subzero temperatures.