Vinyl resin copolymer products, like those based on vinyl resin polymers, are ubiquitous and wide-ranging in their applications. Practically speaking, the uses and advantages of copolymers are limited only by the variety of materials which can blend with a given copolymer and act as a medium for it.
These materials and the copolymers with which they’re blended determine the physical properties of the resulting blend or product. Copolymers can change the properties of the material(s) with which they’re mixed to confer advantages like increased tensile strength or flame resistance; or other properties beneficial for almost any physical property desirable for commercial or industrial purposes, like coating, sealing or adhesion. Virtually any industry which employs chemical engineering can benefit from using copolymer resins.
Industry applications expand and benefit from copolymer technological solutions like, for example, the manufacture of copolymer emulsions without the need for an added emulsifier. Shin-Etsu and its subsidiaries are, by design, at the cutting-edge of such technologies and those like them.
Two product lines resulting from Shin-Etsu’s approach to vinyl resin copolymer technologies are Solbin and Vinyblan. The versatile nature of vinyl resin copolymers allows for considerable variation, even within the same product range. Vinyblan 278, for example, offers greater flexibility than other Vinyblan formulations for coatings, inks and paintings, even though Vinyblan generally excels in these applications anyway.
These are good examples for illustrating how the same copolymer technology can be reformulated and applied in completely different ways. After all, these are only a couple of applications of vinyl resin copolymers among many thousands of other actual applications and frankly innumerable potential applications.
Vinyl resin copolymers have the potential to completely change both materials themselves and materials technology over time. Chemical engineering and the passage of time have yet to exhaust this potential. It will drive industrial solutions for years to come. In the story of vinyl resin copolymers, we’re much closer to the beginning than we are to the end of the technological solutions arising from their application.