As part of our blogs we will be covering some of the industries where our products are being tested in the field and also in action with our clients.
For this blog we will cover an agricultural element test program with attempting to reduce the amount of algae build-up and to reduce the leakage through cracking that inevitability occurs on a Livestock drinking trough in outback Australia.
For this we will be using one of our main industrial products FPU industrial along with an experimental Nanoscale PU coating.
In March 2017 we travelled from our Australian test facility into the interior of Australia to the edge of the wheat & sheep belt to marginal farming territories to carry out a test on a new large volume trough. We took our long term test ford for a quick outback drive. See the blog about this car here.
One arriving we found that the trough was empty of water and had a very healthy build-up of algae on the sides and plenty of dust. We set to and cleaned the trough in preparation of the coatings.
Once thing we did see was that the concrete forming of the trough had a rough finish and very pitted with micro and macro holing so we were not confident that sealing without compromising the coatings would not occur.
We coated the trough 50% FPU Industrial and 50% experimental PU coating and applied it by painting on with a standard paintbrush. We noticed that there was bubbling through some of the pitting in the concrete which means we will need to include a concrete sealant into the best practises to eliminate the bubbling.
On applying the coatings were touch dry in 10 minutes and imparting a very smooth surface which was the objective and the larger crack that had been leaking was sealed. (the cracking is important to seal as the livestock will dig around the base of the trough to get to the water on the ground. This is especially the case when there is algae buildup in the trough as the livestock do not like the algae in the trough and prefer to dig into the ground which opens the cracking further in the trough)
We will leave this test to run for 12 months and we will revisit the trough in March 2018 to see the results and gain an understanding on what we can do to improve and refine the products for this job.
Stay tuned for Phase 2 revisit to the test site @ 12 months.
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