ICI Paints is a leading international paint business. It concentrates primarily on decorative paint (90% of sales in 2005) and packaging coatings for food and beverage cans.
The decorative paints business has well-established brands in paint, woodcare, metalcare, adhesives and fillers. These include ‘Dulux’, ‘Gliden’, ‘Devoe’, ‘Valentine’, ‘Coral’, ‘Alba’, ‘Xyladecor’, ‘Hammerite’, ‘Polycell’, ‘Polyfilla’ and ‘Alabastine’.
Technology and innovation are important factors for ICI Paints. Success is enhanced by being first to the market with innovative, value-adding products and services that meet market needs.
Treating fences: quicker and easier
Working with the leading European supplier of garden spraying equipment, the technical, marketing and packaging teams of ICI Paints set about investigating what would actually be required to do the “impossible” – find a way of spraying high viscosity fence treatments with hand-pressurised sprayers.
The result is ‘Cuprinol Sprayable’, a faster and easier way to treat exterior wooden fence panels. These panels – as large as 6x6 ft / 2x2 m can be treated in less than four minutes, a fraction of the time it would normally take with a brush.
The novelty of the breakthrough technology lies in the combination of
- a unique nozzle incorporating design features that promote a fan-shaped spray, which results in a uniform spray pattern, yet minimises aerosol formation, and
- a specially formulated aqueous wood coating, which contains a thickening system designed to give body to the coating in-can, but which breaks down rapidly under the particular spray conditions to allow droplet formation. Other thickeners break down slowly leading to "stringiness" of the liquid spray and uneven coating.
This combination allows accurate and even spraying with minimal effort – and a professional finish in just one coat.
