In short: Benchmarking against a SYLOID® grade in a solvent-based system turns on three things a waterborne trial weights differently: how hard the powder is to wet out and mill, how the film reads at 85° as well as 60°, and whether the can settles hard over a month. Run the candidate beside the incumbent in the same resin, at two loadings, on the same day.
In a waterborne system the binder is dispersed and the risk sits in stability over weeks. In a solvent-based system the binder is dissolved, the film forms as solvent leaves, and the risks move to the front of the process: wetting, milling, and what the resin does to the particle while it is in the can.
That changes which grade you start from. An untreated silica in a solvent-rich resin resists wetting — the powder floats, agglomerates survive the mill, and you pay for it in grind time and in seeds in the film. An organically treated grade is designed for exactly this medium.
It also changes what you watch on the panel. Solvent systems are often applied thinner and built up in coats, so thickness-dependent haze and the 85° sheen reading carry more weight than they do on a single heavy waterborne coat.
Change one thing. Same resin lot, same solids, same dispersion equipment and mill time, same loading by weight, same substrate, same applicator, same flash-off and cure, same day, same room. The incumbent runs through the whole trial as the control — not a retained panel from last quarter.
Run two loadings. A grade that matches at one dose but responds more steeply to a change in dose will drift on a production line where dosing is never exact. The slope is the information; the single point is not.
Record mill time to your normal grind reading, and the viscosity of the finished paste at the temperature the line actually runs at — not at 25 °C in the laboratory if the shop floor is at 12 °C in January.
Gloss at 60° and 85°. The 60° reading is what the specification quotes; the 85° reading is what the eye sees as sheen at a low viewing angle, and it is where a substitution most often gets rejected by the end customer despite passing on paper.
Haze on a clear film over a dark substrate. Build the film the way your line builds it — same number of coats — and look for milkiness. On a pigmented system this is invisible; on a clear lacquer over dark wood it is the whole decision.
Tactile feel. Silky, dry, chalky and slightly rough all sit on the same gloss number and are judged by hand, blind, by two or three people. Write down the words they use.
Settling in the can. A month at ambient and at elevated temperature, then check whether the sediment stirs back in with normal agitation and whether a panel drawn from the stored can still matches the fresh one. This is where most solvent-system substitutions fail after the lab has approved them.
For solvent-based work our starting point is CENSIL 525L, the organically treated grade, with CENSIL 560N (untreated) and CENSIL 230W (treated for waterborne systems) alongside so the set spans the treatment gradient. If your plant is converting a line from solvent to water, running all three at once tells you where you land before and after the conversion.
Customers commonly benchmark our coating matting grades against products such as W. R. Grace SYLOID® and SYLOBLOC® and Evonik ACEMATT®. Naming those reference points places a grade in the market; it is not a claim of equivalence, and fit is established on your resin.
The grade that loses a clear-coat trial is often the right grade for the pigmented line next door, where haze is invisible and dispersion effort is what costs money. Keep the losing data.
No. We will say which of our grades customers most often bench against it, send the sample set and write the test plan. Equivalence is a claim about your resin and your line, which we have not run.
Because a bare silica surface is water-loving and resists wetting by a solvent-rich resin. That is what the organic surface treatment on a grade like CENSIL 525L is for. If a candidate is fighting your mill, check the treatment before you reject the grade.
The five properties are the same; the weighting changes. Waterborne trials put more emphasis on stability over weeks and on coalescence, and should start from a grade treated for waterborne systems rather than a solvent-system grade.
One to two days on the bench, then a month of storage before you commit. The storage check is not optional — hard settling is the failure that costs the most to find in production.
Third-party product and brand names are the trademarks of their respective owners and are used here only to identify the reference points customers benchmark against. No equivalence, affiliation or endorsement is claimed or implied.
The material you use now, the formulation or resin, the equipment and the target you need to hit. That is enough for us to say whether we have something worth testing.
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