Expanding The Use Of Aluminum Cans: Improving The Performance Of Can Coatings
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Aluminum cans offer an attractive alternative for sustainable packaging in the beverage industry to mitigate the global environmental burden caused by the poor waste management of single-use plastics. Nevertheless, the number of beverage products launched onto the market with challenging matrices (e.g. spirit-based drinks, wine, kombucha) is increasing, and their packaging in aluminum cans becomes a challenge due to incompatibility with current internal can coatings; especially with the new generations of coatings replacing bisphenol A-epoxy resins, the gold standard beverage can coatings for decades. Although several alternative coating chemistries including polyesters, acrylics, or epoxy resins non-containing bisphenol A, have been developed and commercialized over the past decade, the overall lower performance against challenging matrices restrains their suitability across a wide variety of matrices in the food and beverage industry. Hence, improving the protective performance of interior can coatings against corrosion remains a challenge in the coating industry.The long-range goal of this dissertation is to develop coating resins with enhanced performance against corrosion for aluminum cans. Chapter 1 reviews the literature on the state-of-the-art of coatings for food and beverage applications while covering the latest developments and challenges by relevant coating chemistries. It also presents a highly unexplored approach for can coatings, but widely utilized for applications outside the food industry, leveraging the knowledge on small organic molecules acting as corrosion inhibitors to provide an enhanced performance. Chapter 2 focuses on the development of a series of unsaturated polyesters with improved control during the polycondensation to yield structurally well-defined materials. It discusses the relevance of the catalyst choice during the development of these materials permitting tailoring of relevant properties for enhancing the coating performance. Chapter 3 uses these well-defined unsaturated polyesters to study the effect of covalently immobilizing polyphenols as corrosion inhibitors, and their contribution towards an increased performance against corrosion for aluminum. To conclude, Chapter 4 summarizes the important points made throughout the execution of this research project and provides guidelines for the next steps in the understanding, design and development of can coatings with enhanced performance to consolidate the use of aluminum cans in the beverage industry.