I'm curious why. Not a chemist at all, but could you expand on this in layman's terms?
I'm not a chemist either but have worked with UV-cured inks & coatings in the print industry for more than 2 decades. The first 15 years was testing on plastic substrates in outdoor applications. Think about horticultural tags or gas pump signage. Environments where ordinary inks & coatings fail in short order. A xenon arc + water spray test chamber is used to run an ASTM test for repeatable test results at an expedited time frame and the length of time in the field can be correlated to the amount of test time prior to adhesion failure.
Standard inks & coatings fail in a very short time period mostly due to the porosity of the UV-cured coating. It allows a tiny amount of water to penetrate and rest on the surface of the substrate. The difference in shrinkage rates of the heat / cool cycles between the inks / coatings and the substrate eventually defeat the adhesion to the substrate.
Inks with UV-cured coatings fail in the test chamber 100% of the time long before a control piece next to it with every other variable the same but minus the UV Coating fails.
There are a couple of ways to gain extended life in this scenario. Different resins / monomers can be used that are resistant to water. This helps tremendously but adds cost. The other way is to use an application method that introduces minimum air entrainment to the coating prior to cure.
The last 8 years my job has been in R&D as a Product Manager for a company that makes only UV-cured inks & coatings for the print industry currently working very closely with 3 professional UV chemists on the team. This topic comes up several times per year with large customers.
I'm positive that there is very little difference in the coatings that we make & sell into the print industry vs the new coatings available for wood finishing and have often thought about doing a little experimenting.
I hope that this makes sense. And I am serious about wanting an update on how this is holding up after a few months of usage as a plant holder.
@trc65
@Phil.H
