Reactive Surfaces of Austin, Texas will open the doors of its new coatings manufacturing plant in Hattiesburg, Mississippi starting July 2012. The company will maintain its corporate headquarters in Austin, and continue to build its bio-based additives elsewhere, but it will expand the manufacturing capacity of the company to include coatings with the new plant. The first of these functional coatings will be clear over coats for military vehicles containing its OPDtox self-decontaminating enzymatic additives.

“We have decided to expand our self-decontamination functional additives offerings to include military coatings incorporating these additives,” said Reactive Surfaces founder and CIO, Steve McDaniel. “We intend to extract greater value from this highly-profitable business with the dual offerings, and to make them immediately available to military customers for testing and adoption. We expect this endeavor to be successful, and to be followed by our other bio-based additives being placed into functional coatings directly available to the end consumer.”

The company is now operational in both the functional additives and the functional coatings businesses.

The new facility will be housed at the University of Southern Mississippi’s (USM) newly-constructed 60,000 square-foot Accelerator. The new facility will provide the company with the ability to accelerate the reduction to practice of its novel functional additives into coating systems specifically designed to take advantage of the unique capability of such additives to produce functional surfaces.

Coatings functionalized with OPDtox have been tested with actual chemical agents and found to add a significant capability to standard military vehicle coatings.

“These overcoats are uniquely capable of converting a military vehicle surface from an otherwise inert contact area to a dynamic surface that rapidly decontaminates significant amounts of weapons-grade organophosphorus nerve toxins,” said USM’s James Rawlins, Reactive Surfaces board member and principal investigator on the military coatings project. “This eliminates significant amounts of time and labor from the battlefield decontamination process, allowing vehicles coated with these systems to rapidly re-enter military operations, and to maximize safety for the war fighter. The overcoats will provide a stable, long-term decontamination capability without any impact on the performance of the underlying vehicle coating.“