Industrial minerals & functional fillers for paints and coatings

Industrial minerals and functional fillers are broken down and carefully prepared, mostly from natural rocks typically found above ground and more rarely underground. This usually includes pre-sorting processes in which a targeted enrichment of the desired minerals and a reduction of the accessory minerals take place. The subsequent grinding steps guarantee uniform particle size distributions, which are absolutely essential to many applications.

In this way, natural stones yield high-performance fillers which, thanks to their particle shape, size and structure, guarantee uniquely improved characteristics in applications involving paints, varnishes, adhesives and construction applications, and often on very attractive terms. This is why we like to call them “functional fillers.”

However, there is still a very long way to go before exhausting all the possibilities. With certain products, thermal processing steps or chemical deposition processes follow, which lead to modifications of the mineral structure or to an additional cleaning, and then ultimately to changed functionalities.

Certain natural as well as some modified mineral products can then be selectively surface treated in order to achieve improved bonding in the various binding systems.