In April, marine coatings business AkzoNobel launched a ‘best-in-class’ anticorrosive universal primer Intershield One-2-One, which delivers simplified maintenance, waste avoidance and enhanced corrosion protection.

Intershield One-2-One, part of AkzoNobel’s International range of marine coatings, is a surface tolerant universal primer used during onboard maintenance. It is based on the company’s Intershield 300 pure epoxy technology, which provides a unique balance of abrasion and corrosion resistance with optimum levels of hardness and flexibility, delivering long-term performance and effective corrosion control.

Applying Intershield One-2-One can reduce paint wastage significantly, as well as reducing the risk of incorrect mixing and subsequent coating failure. These benefits are possible, owing to the availability of small crew-friendly pack sizes with an equal mix ratio that can be handled with ease by users.

Intershield One-2-One can be used as a primer on most areas of a vessel. This versatility enables simplified paint stock management for crew members who can consolidate several products into a single maintenance solution.

It meets all the required onboard maintenance characteristics as well as the service performance expectations of the vessel operator.

Intershield One-2-One features enhanced surface tolerance properties that enable it to be applied to a range of surfaces with reduced surface preparation requirements.

It has been engineered for use in temperatures as low as –5 °C and will cure to dry film down to –20 °C.

This removes the need for weather-dependent onboard maintenance in most areas, providing vessels and crew with increased flexibility in maintenance scheduling.

“In an industry where crew members continue to face increased responsibilities, optimising time spent on onboard maintenance is essential,” says AkzoNobel MD Robert Wong.

With Intershield One-2-One, the company has delivered a simplified and versatile solution that enables crew members to use purchased coatings effectively and efficiently, on many surfaces and in many operating environments.

This effectively ensures that shipowners prevent the onset and progression of costly corrosion, and protect the integrity of a vessel’s steel, even while operating in harsh environments.

“It reflects our focus on providing essential innovations that meet our customers’ maintenance requirements,” notes Wong.

Additionally, in March, AkzoNobel announced that shipowners and operators can now benefit from improvements in operational, cost and environmental efficiencies as a result of the latest antifouling developed by AkzoNobel, which is set to revolutionise the biocidal coatings market.

The company notes that Intercept 8500 LPP is the highest-performing biocidal antifouling in the company’s international range of marine coatings. It is designed for the deep-sea market and is the latest addition to AkzoNobel’s Intercept product range, a family of patented biocidal antifouling coatings that deliver consistent, predictable linear polishing fouling control performance for in-service periods of up to 90 months, even on high-risk fouling routes.

It also comes with extended performance guarantees, proven in-service performance, and a unique polymer combination that incorporates AkzoNobel’s patented Lubyon technology with a silyl methacrylate self-polishing copolymer.

“Intercept 8500 LPP’s unique polymer combination delivers a step change in biocidal coatings performance that will revolutionise the biocidal coatings market,” says AkzoNobel antifouling business manager Carl Barnes.

“Based on in-service trials which included high-risk fouling routes between the Arabian Gulf and South-East Asia, Intercept 8500 LPP surpasses the fouling control performance of all our biocidal coatings,” says Barnes.

The exact operational, cost and environmental efficiencies delivered by Intercept 8500 LPP are dependent on the unique characteristics and trading patterns of each vessel.
Using Intertrac Vision AkzoNobel’s ‘big data’ hull performance prediction technology – shipowners and operators can access an accurate picture of the product’s performance on their vessels over the full dry-docking cycle, prior to application.

“Intercept 8500 LPP is the culmination of ten years of research and development, and investment in innovation by AkzoNobel’s research scientists, hydrodynamicists and marine biologists,” explains AkzoNobel MD Oscar Wezenbeek.

Wezenbeek adds, that the company is proud of its track record in sustainable innovation and the performance and sustainability benefits that it can bring to its customers. The coating is applied using the same techniques as other biocidal coatings, with no additional costs, time or resource provisions necessary during dry-docking.

Barnes adds, “We are extremely confident in the added value that Intercept 8500 LPP can bring our customers. As a tangible demonstration of this confidence, AkzoNobel is offering enhanced guarantees in its Performance Maintenance Agreements for Intercept 8500 LPP.

These include guaranteed degradation of no more than 4% and a static performance guarantee of up to 35 days, both of which offer enhanced assurance in comparison to any biocidal antifouling coatings and silicon foul release products.