Fujitsu pioneers use of water-based paint for ICT equipment

Fujitsu Limited and Fujitsu Laboratories Limited announced the industry's first in development of a water-based paint for use on the plastic chassis of servers, personal computers, and other ICT equipment. The new water-based paint is used on the front panels of the SPARC M10-4 and SPARC M10-4S in the SPARC M10 series of UNIX servers available in 2013.

This newly developed water-based paint uses two kinds of resin in a core shell structure(1), and tuning the volatility makes it possible to create adhesion between resin particles and enable painting at low temperatures. Compared to solvent-based paints, this cuts the use of petroleum resources by 54% and volatile organic compounds (VOCs)(2) by 80%.

Fujitsu plans to expand the use of this kind of paint in its own products, such as servers and notebook computers, as a way to use natural resources more efficiently and reduce its environmental footprint.

At present, most ICT equipment, such as servers and personal computers, use solvent-based paint, and switching to water-based paint presents the challenges of drying the paint to cause the resin particles to bond, and maintaining the level of paint performance demanded in the context of ICT equipment chassis.

With solvent-based paints, the resin particles that will make up the coating are dissolved in solvent, so they adhere easily to the surface being coated, but with water-based paints, the resin particles are suspended in the water as tiny particles, rather than being dissolved, so making them join together and bond requires the liquid to be boiled. Most water-based paints need to be heated to a temperature of 100°C or above to boil and then dry the liquid, but the plastics used for ICT equipment chassis cannot withstand such high temperatures without deforming. Furthermore, the requirements for solidity, adhesion, chemical resistance, weather resistance, and appearance for paints used on ICT equipment chassis make high-performance coatings a necessity.

Fujitsu Laboratories has developed a water-based paint that can be dried at a temperature that does not cause plastic chassis to deform, with resin particles that can bond, and that has the coating performance required for ICT equipment. By fine-tuning its volatility, this water-based paint can be dried at a low temperature of 65°C, cool enough not to deform plastic chassis. In addition, it uses two types of resin in a core shell structure, so that a soft resin is used in the shell to encourage bonding between particles. The core uses a hard resin to form the tough coating that ICT equipment needs, resulting in coating performance suitable for use in ICT equipment chassis.

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