It is difficult to achieve thickening in water-soluble thickening systems. For example, the most commonly used thickeners in our building coatings, such as alkali swelling and cellulose thickeners, are rarely used due to their serious impact on the water resistance, salt spray resistance, and other properties of the coating system. In addition, commonly used thickening agents, such as hydrophobic modified alkali swelling, and polyurethane associative thickening agent, mainly use association with lotion particles to form a spatial network structure to achieve the thickening effect.
However, our water-soluble coating system contains a large amount of alcohol ether solvents, which can seriously affect its binding process and cause the failure of these thickeners.
The most common thickeners in water-soluble systems are montmorillonite based gas silicates, which mainly use hydrogen bonds to form a spatial network structure to achieve the thickening effect.
However, materials like silica and montmorillonite usually affect the overall luster of the system, so they are not particularly commonly used in water-soluble systems. For systems with high requirements for gloss and fullness, we can use materials such as polyurea and polyamide wax, which also utilize hydrogen bonds to achieve the structure of the spatial network and achieve the thickening effect. Especially for polyamide wax, it basically does not affect the overall gloss and fullness, and the thickening efficiency will be very high.
Post time: Oct-08-2026