“The future of coatings will be digitally designed”
ACC keynote speaker discusses how advanced analytics, AI, and new polymer architectures are reshaping coatings chemistry
Bedri Erdem,
Chief Technology Officer at Rust-Oleum Corporation
With legacy materials facing regulatory and performance limits, Bedri Erdem, Chief Technology Officer at Rust-Oleum Corporation, explores how integrating molecular insight with AIdriven discovery platforms can accelerate the development of sustainable, high performance coatings at scale.
You describe chemistry as a longstanding foundation of the coatings industry. What new role do you believe chemistry must play today, as sustainability, performance, and growth become inseparable priorities?
Let us start with where we are and how we got there.
Tremendous progress has shaped the coatings industry for nearly a century, with chemistry serving as its central engine of innovation. Foundational breakthroughs—from early dryingoil and proteinbased systems to Staudinger’s macromolecular framework—established the principles of polymer architecture, molecular weight control, and reactive film formation. The transformative chemistries of the 1930s, including polyurethanes, silicones, and epoxies, still underpin modern crosslinking, network design, and interfacial performance. Over the past four decades, advances in emulsion polymerization, controlled radical processes such as RAFT and ATRP, and improved colloidal stabilization enabled high performance waterborne technologies with reduced VOCs. In parallel, powder coatings and UV/EBcure systems delivered energy efficient thermosetting options aligned with global sustainability goals. Yet, as demands intensify—spanning circularity, durability, barrier protection, and emerging needs in energy, transportation, water, communication, and health—legacy chemistries reveal structural limits. The next competitive frontier requires true molecular level innovation, including novel monomers, degradable and bioderived polymer architectures, hybrid networks, precision engineered macromolecules, and computationally accelerated discovery to commercialize future generations of high performance, sustainable coatings. Such progress can catalyze the development of next generation technology platforms, enabling differentiated coating architectures and accelerated market expansion.
In your keynote, you emphasize reinvesting in new molecules and chemistries. Where do you see the greatest opportunity for molecular-level innovation to unlock both sustainability and performance gains in coatings?
The coatings industry is entering an inflection point where regulatory, performance, safety, and environmental forces are exposing fundamental limits in legacy polymer systems. Chemistries developed nearly a century ago—such as isocyanatebased polyurethanes, BPA-epoxies, polycarbonate architectures, silicone-MEKO cure systems, and formaldehyde crosslinked amino resins—now face sustained scrutiny due to toxicological, emissions, and end-of-life concerns. Simultaneously, the drive to eliminate surfactants, reactive crosslinkers, PFOS/PFAS derivatives, and other formulation auxiliaries is constraining even mature platforms. These pressures coincide with rapidly expanding application spaces—from energy storage and e-mobility to advanced electronics, biomedical substrates, and extreme environment industrial systems—each demanding sophisticated control of polymer architecture, network topology, adhesion mechanisms, and environmental durability. Meeting these needs requires capabilities such as adhesion to low energy substrates, cure-on-demand mechanisms, advanced thermal management, engineered fire protection, and resilience under severe conditions. True progress will require moving beyond incremental formulation tweaks toward molecular level innovation: novel monomers, degradable and bioderived polymers, hybrid inorganic–organic networks, stimuli-responsive systems, and computationally accelerated discovery pipelines that deliver the next generation of high performance, sustainable coatings.
Sustainability is often perceived as a constraint. From your perspective, how can chemistry turn sustainability requirements into a competitive advantage and a driver of growth?
Sustainability pressures driven by evolving regulatory, environmental, health, and safety frameworks are fundamentally reshaping the coatings industry. Global VOC limits, REACH driven polymer scrutiny, endocrine disruptor assessment, microplastic restrictions, and circular economy mandates continue to intensify, making clear that longterm resilience cannot rely on incremental compliance. Instead, sustainability must be integrated into the core design logic of materials, processes, and valuechain systems. Achieving this shift requires the same scientific rigor and paradigm challenging mindset that enabled early macromolecular breakthroughs. By grounding innovation in molecular level understanding—structure–property relationships, kinetic modeling, network topology, interfacial thermodynamics, degradability pathways, and lifecycle analytics—the industry can engineer next generation systems built for future regulatory and performance expectations. Progress will depend on transformative chemistry, including expanded monomer landscapes, degradable or bioderived macromolecular frameworks, precision controlled polymerization, circular design architectures, and computationally accelerated discovery integrated into earlystage R&D. As demonstrated in pharmaceuticals, deepscience investment and AI enabled discovery pipelines convert sustainability from a constraint into a competitive advantage.
Looking ahead, what capabilities – scientific, technological, or organizational – will be most critical for coatings companies to successfully transform chemistry into long-term market leadership?
Over the past several decades, major advances in analytical and material characterization technologies have fundamentally reshaped how the coatings industry interrogates and designs complex polymer systems. high-resolution spectroscopic methods—including multidimensional NMR, advanced FTIR, XPS, and synchrotron enabled techniques—now provide molecularscale insight into polymer morphology, interphases, and heterogeneous network structures. Complementary nanoscale imaging platforms such as AFM, SEMEDS, and cryoTEM enable visualization of domains, interfaces, and failure pathways with unprecedented fidelity. Parallel innovations in chromatographic separation, hyphenated mass spectrometry, and rheospectroscopic analysis allow precise mapping of molecular weight distributions, reactive species evolution, cure kinetics, and structure–property relationships. These capabilities, combined with a growing pipeline of novel chemistries emerging from academic and industrial research, are accelerating progress across the value chain. The industry’s next major inflection point lies in integrating these analytical and mechanistic insights into unified digital and AIdriven platforms. Machine learning accelerated modeling, virtual polymerization screening, and generative design workflows are transforming linear R&D cycles into adaptive, feedback driven discovery engines—positioning the field for stepchange advances in sustainable, high performance coatings.
To design, develop and successfully scale and commercialize such breakthrough innovation, it is imperative that organizations invest in mid to long term cooperative research and strong collaboration across our value chain.
