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Paint

Paint is the general term for a family of products used to protect and add color to an object or surface by covering it with a pigmented coating. As a verb, painting is the application of paint. more...

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Someone who paints artistically is usually called a painter, while someone who paints commercially is often referred to as a painter and decorator.

Paint can be applied to almost any kind of object. It is used, among many other uses, in the production of art, in industrial coating, as a driving aid (lane markings), or as a preservative (to prevent corrosion or water damage). Paint is a semifinished product, as the final product is the painted article itself.

Components

There are three primary components to a paint: binder, diluent, and additives. However, only the binder is absolutely required. The binder is the part which eventually solidifies to form the dried paint film. The diluent serves to adjust the viscosity of the paint. It is volatile and does not become part of the paint film. There are various additives, which components that are added to improve some property, such as color opacity and matness, pigment dispersion, or stability. Pigments or dyes are among the most common additives. They give a color to a paint. Pigments may also have the same functions as fillers: increase the thickness and hardness of the film and adjust the coloring power and opacity.

Typical binders include synthetic or natural resins such as acrylics, polyurethanes, polyesters, melamines, epoxy, or oils. Binders can be categorized into three sorts: those that dry, those that cure when they dry, and those that do not depend on drying for curing. Paints that dry contain a solid binder dissolved in a solvent; this forms a solid film when the solvent evaporates, and the film can dissolve in the solvent again. Latex paints, for example, cure irreversibly when they dry, since they undergo polymerization into irreversibly bound networked structures, so that the paint will not redissolve in the solvent. Recent environmental protection requirements discourage the use of evaporating solvents (VOCs), and alternative means of curing have been developed, particularly for industrial purposes. Epoxy coating, for example, is applied by mixing paint and hardener, which cure by forming a hard plastic structure. Such paints do not, strictly speaking, "dry" at all, but harden. In UV curing paints, the solvent is evaporated first, and hardening is then initiated by ultraviolet light.

Typical diluents include organic solvents such as petroleum distillate, alcohols, ketones, esters, glycol ethers, and the like. Water is a common diluent. Sometimes volatile low-molecular weight synthetic resins also serve as diluents.

Fillers serve to thicken the film, support its structure and simply increase the volume of the paint. Not all paints include fillers. Pigments that also function as fillers are called simply "pigments"; "fillers" are generally color-neutral and opaque. It is necessary to adjust the resulting off-white color with pigments to give the desired color. Common fillers are cheap and inert, such as talc, lime, baryte, clay, etc. Depending on the paint, most of the paint film may consist of pigment/filler and binder, the rest being other additives.