As more Americans rent and housing demographics shift to favor the contractor market for paints and coatings, incorporating additives, specifically rheology modifiers, into a formulation can help meet desired performance.

The most effective way to minimize the number of coats needed for an aesthetically pleasing finish is to maximize the applied hiding of the coating.

Part one of this article discusses the theory of optimizing applied hiding and new techniques used to characterize applied paint films to determine the influence of rheology on application.