Multifunctional barrier coating systems created by multilayer curtain coating, TAPPI Journal November 2023

Application: For those contemplating a new coater for their mill, a multilayer curtain coater offers a cost-effective and technically advantageous option for the production of barrier coated paper and paperboard grades. Also, for companies that already have multilayer curtain coaters, this paper demonstrates how to create multilayered coatings for producing multifunctional barrier performance.

Author: Don Ventresca, Benjamin Benz, David Eisenhauer, Greg Welsch, and Dustin Burton

ABSTRACT: Functional coatings are applied to paper and paperboard substrates to provide resistance, or a barrier, against media such as oil and grease, water, water vapor, and oxygen, for applications such as food packaging, food service, and other non-food packaging. Today, there is increasing interest in developing recyclable and more sustainable approaches for producing these types of packages. This paper focuses on water-based barrier coatings (WBBC) for oil and grease resistance (OGR), water, moisture vapor transmission rate (MVTR), and oxygen barrier performance. The main goal is to create coated systems that can achieve more than one barrier property using multilayer curtain coating (MLCC) in a single application step. One advantage is in optimizing coating material cost with the use of functional chemistry in confined layers where performance is balanced within the coating layered structure. This allows simultaneous application of layers of different polymer types in one step to achieve the appropriate performance needs for a given barrier application. This paper provides working examples of using MLCC to create coating structures with multiple barrier properties in a single application pass. Barrier polymers studied include styrene butadiene, styrene acrylate, starch-containing emulsions, and polyvinyl alcohol. The paper also shows the effect of increasing the pigment volume concentration with platy clay or fine ground calcium carbonate on MVTR and OGR barrier properties.