Paints and coatings manufacturer PPG Industries (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA) signed a non-exclusive patent license agreement with the U.S. Naval Air Warfare Center's Aircraft Division (NAWCAD) (Patuxent River, Maryland, USA) for a trivalent chromium pre-treatment (TCP) coating.
Randall Brady, global segment manager for the manufacturer, says the company will use the Navy’s formula in its commercial products. “After evaluating the coating, we found it to be so beneficial that we knew our customers would be interested,” Brady says, adding that the company plans to qualify the new coating products to military specification Mil-C-81706 in early 2019.
U.S. Navy scientist Craig Matzdorf leads the research team at the research center in Patuxent River. His investigations have led to multiple U.S. patents on anticorrosion formulations that avoid using hexavalent chromium, a known carcinogen. “Even though it works very well technically, hex chrome is toxic to people and animals,” Matzdorf says.
TechLink (Bozeman, Montana, USA), a national partnership intermediary for technology transfer with the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) (Washington, DC, USA), says it has contacted dozens of companies with information on the capabilities of trivalent chromium technologies. TCP has been licensed and commercialized globally and should expand its aerospace applications with recent improvements, TechLink explains.
Dan Swanson, senior technology manager with the intermediary, initially contacted PPG in 2004 and has maintained supportive communications since. The manufacturer has increased collaboration with NAWCAD in recent years, but it had not previously licensed this technology.
“We’ve been helping labs and companies partner since 1999, and we have supported the commercialization of TCP since 2004,” Swanson says. “This gives us an institutional memory which we can leverage with companies like PPG and DoD inventors like Craig Matzdorf who have been innovating for a long time. We’re very happy to see this agreement completed and look forward to hearing about PPG’s success.”
Source: TechLink, techlinkcenter.org.