Adding a high-quality touch to plastic surfaces: polyurethane soft-touch coatings
Pleasant, soft, warm – these are attributes seldom associated with plastics. Soft-touch coatings are used to modify plastic surfaces in just this way. We often do not consciously perceive its “haptics”. Nevertheless, the significance of haptic perception should not be underestimated, because we very easily associate emotional statements such as “pleasantly velvety” or “warm” with an object’s “handle”. The astonishing thing is that a coating film only a few hundredths of a millimeter thick can drastically alter the tactile perception of a material or a component. Coating manufacturers can elicit just about any tactile sensation by varying their choice of raw materials. The variability and versatility of coating technology is a major advantage over the use of other surfaces – plastic skins, for example – to improve the way objects feel.
The introduction of so-called “soft-touch” coatings greatly enhanced the image of plastics, particularly for high-quality products.Such coatings are used today on laptops, telephones and even vacuum cleaners. A major area of application is the automotive industry, where soft-touch surfaces in automotive interiors lend a feel of quality to the plastics that are now used nearly everywhere. In addition, such surfaces are very resistant to abrasion and scratching. They have low gloss levels and thus low reflectivity. Soft-touch coatings are now available in a number of colors and also as effect coatings.
An overview of the advantages of soft-touch surfaces:
- warm and velvety handle
- high abrasion and scratch resistance
- low gloss, low reflectivity
- wide variety of shades and color effects possible
Select coating raw materials for solventborne soft-feel coatings Select raw materials for waterborne soft-feel coatings UV-curing softfeel systems
Select coating raw materials for solventborne soft-feel coatings
