Do You know What’s Behind Your Favorite Leather Finish Car Cover?

Guess what separates the way we live today from what was the situation some 100 years back?

Don’t rake your brains much. Just look around. It is that bucket, that shaver, that favorite jacket with leather finish which would give you the answer. Yes, you got it, it is plastic, my friend!

Plastic and by extension polymers (the material behind plastic) are now inseparable part our lives today. So much so, that we can’t even imagine of making much way without it.

Now that I have mentioned jacket with leather finish (my favorite), let’s see how that polished leather finish is imparted. The compound responsible for leather finishes is crosslinker. Companies such as Hauthaway.com have been at the forefront of this application.

Crosslinkers enhance the performance of both solvent-borne and aqueous coatings in many industries. A crosslinker elongates short, medium, and even long chains – making them longer, thereby increasing chain entanglement.

Most of the finishing systems in the leather industry, more often than not, utilize aqueous polyurethanes (“polyurethane dispersions”) or aqueous acrylics (“acrylic latexes”) as the principal polymeric binders. Mostly the combination of these two is utilized.

For many high performance applications, such as upholstery leather finishing, crosslinking is essential and the most commonly encountered crosslinkers are medium oligomeric molecular weight, water-dispersible polyisocyanates.

Some are supplied in solvent at 50 - 90% solids; others are solvent-free, viscous liquids. Water-dispersible carbodiimides, also of a molecular weight that justifies calling them oligomers, are of increasing interest as crosslinkers for leather finishes.

Polymers are not only responsible for leather finishes, they are also the crucial material behind some awesome innovations such as flame retardant polymers. I will discuss it in my next post.