Sherwin-Williams Protective & Marine and its project partners earned three Society for Protective Coatings (SSPC) Structure Awards, which recognize top coatings projects from the past year. The company won the Charles G. Munger Award, Eric S. Kline Award and the Military Coatings Project Award of Excellence.
The awards recognize a variety of coatings achievements, including evaluating a copper-free anti-foulant technology on a fast transport military vessel, delivering long-term service life for a colorful New Mexico water tower; and enabling efficient shop applications on steel for a major New York bridge project.
The SSPC Structure Awards are given annually to projects in seven categories representing an array of structures and service conditions. They honor individuals and companies who have represented the coatings industry in a positive light. The winning projects were recognized Feb. 3, 2020, during the annual Awards Luncheon at the SSPC Coatings+ Conference in Long Beach, Calif.
“The SSPC Structure Awards represent the best applications of advanced coatings technologies that prolong the service life and beauty of impressive structures around the world. That’s exactly what Sherwin-Williams and our project partners strive to do every day in our work,” Sherwin-Williams W. Doni Riddle, senior vice president of sales, said in a prepared statement announcing the awards. “Sherwin-Williams has been recognized multiple years in a row, which demonstrates our commitment to enhancing asset protection, enabling efficiencies and advancing coatings science. These qualities are demonstrated in each of this year’s award-winning projects, and they wouldn’t have been possible without the fine work of the asset owners, specifiers, engineers and applicators in leveraging high-performance coatings to obtain excellent results.”
For the second year in a row — and third time since 2014 — Sherwin-Williams Protective & Marine earned a top distinction for its contribution to protecting military vessels from corrosion with the 2020 Military Coatings Project Award of Excellence. This year’s award recognizes the coatings work performed on the U.S. Navy’s Military Sealift Command (MSC) vessel Millinocket (T-EPF-3), including the evaluation of a copper-free antifoulant technology.
In 2015, MSC selected Sherwin-Williams SeaVoyage Copper-Free Antifouling Paint for evaluation to ensure the coating would deliver the expected durability and service life on the Spearhead-class high-speed expeditionary fast transport vessel. The copper-free coating protects against both soft and hard fouling using a combination of biocides that are non-persistent in the environment. The biocides simply degrade into non-toxic components in 24 hours in seawater,
preventing heavy metal accumulation in ports and harbors. When the Millinocket underwent drydock maintenance in early 2019, SeaVoyage Copper-Free met MSC’s expectations, confirming the coating’s suitability and long-term performance for other vessels of this class.
The 2019 drydocking also included underwater hull preservation maintenance. Applicators applied SeaGuard 5000HS Epoxy to the vessel’s underwater hull, strainers, waterjet tunnels, engine exhausts and ride control fins, as well as Nova-Plate UHS Epoxy coating to the high-wear waterjet tunnels for added durability. The final step included a fresh application of SeaVoyage Copper-Free to the vessel’s entire submerged and splash zone areas.
The global project team included MSC; Vigor, Portland, Ore.; and the Naval Surface Warfare Center Carderock located in West Bethesda, Md., as the consulting engineer. Singapore-based EuroNavy Coatings (S) Pte Ltd. provided technical support during drydocking maintenance performed at the Sembawang Shipyard in Singapore.
Sherwin-Williams and associated partner companies previously won the Military Coatings Project Award of Excellence for their work on the U.S. Navy’s George Washington (CVN-73) super carrier in 2019 and the Ronald Reagan (CVN-76) super carrier in 2014.
