Coatings World: Q&A: Amy Mercante, PPG Specialty Products

Optical coatings are playing an increasingly important role in delivering the performance, durability and functionality required by today’s eyewear and emerging optical technologies. Coatings World spoke with Amy Mercante, general manager of PPG’s Specialty Products business, about what optical coatings can tell us about the future of functional coatings, the importance of customer-driven innovation, and what it takes to move highly engineered technologies from the lab to commercial scale.

Amy Mercante, General Manager, PPG Specialty Products

CW: You began your career as a research chemist and now lead PPG’s Specialty Products business, which includes optical monomers and coatings. How has that background shaped the way you think about coatings innovation?

Mercante: Starting my career in the lab gave me an appreciation for the science behind a product, but the roles I’ve held since then have taught me that great science is only a part of successful innovation. Science is the reason we’re able to create products that protect and beautify the world.

Today, I lead PPG’s Specialty Products business, including our Optical Monomers and Coatings team. PPG has more than 70 years of experience in engineering and producing optical monomers and coatings, so there is tremendous technical expertise within the organization. My role is not to be the expert on every technology. It is to make sure we are listening to our customers, empowering our experts and connecting the right people and capabilities to solve a problem.

Photo: PPG

That is especially important in optical coatings because product performance requirements are so precise. Very high quality and reliability are required for producing millions of eyewear lenses. Ultimately, innovation must deliver value not only in the laboratory, but also in manufacturing and in the marketplace for the person wearing the finished product.

CW: What can optical coatings tell us about the broader future of functional and specialty coatings?

Mercante: Optical coatings are a perfect example of how coatings are increasingly being asked to do more.

In ophthalmic applications, coatings provide very specific functionality. For example, PPG HI-GARD® lens coating solutions provide durable, scratch-resistant protection for plastic ophthalmic lenses. At the same time, the finished optical system still must meet extremely high expectations for clarity, durability, consistency and the experience of the person wearing it.

I think that reflects a broader trend across specialty coatings. Customers increasingly want multiple benefits from one solution, and they don’t necessarily want to make tradeoffs to get them. That puts greater emphasis on understanding how the coating interacts with the underlying material, the manufacturing process and the final application.

For us, the opportunity is to look at that entire system rather than considering any single material or coating in isolation. This may include hard-coat compatibility with anti-reflective and topcoat stacks as well as adhesion to new lens materials being developed for smart eyewear.

Photo: PPG

CW: How do customer needs shape the way you establish performance priorities for optical coatings?

Mercante: It starts with listening.

My team and I make it a priority to understand our customers’ goals, challenges and opportunities because that is what allows us to move from being a supplier to a true partner. In optical, our customers are working to meet increasingly high expectations for quality, clarity, durability and performance, and we need to understand the immediate requirement from our customers, where their businesses are headed next and the expectations from the final eyewear consumers.

That becomes particularly important as new technologies emerge. The optical industry is evolving beyond traditional vision correction into areas such as smart eyewear and new digital manufacturing approaches. Those changes can create entirely new challenges and requirements for materials and coatings.

This is very similar to the approach used by Steve Jobs who famously said, “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology.” In our business, the question becomes: What does the customer need this coating to enable? Once we understand that, our technical teams can work backwards from the application to identify the right performance characteristics, materials and manufacturing approach.

CW: Optical applications can require clarity, scratch resistance, durability and manufacturability at the same time. How do you approach balancing competing performance requirements?

Mercante: That balance is really at the heart of specialty materials innovation. You rarely have the luxury of optimizing for just one characteristic.

Eyewear is a particularly good illustration because consumers have very high expectations for something they wear every day. They want clear vision, comfort, durability and protection from everyday wear and tear.

Recent testing conducted by PPG and HOYA Vision Care comparing the performance of PPG TRIVEX® lens material to polycarbonate across multiple optical and durability categories demonstrated just how important that combination of attributes is. The research evaluated factors including impact performance, optical clarity, weight and chemical resistance rather than looking at one measure alone. The results clearly demonstrated that the PPG TRIVEX® lens material offers the preferred combination of clarity, durability and wearability for the eyewear consumers.

Coatings have to be considered within an overall performance system. A solution needs to meet and exceed the intended purpose while working effectively with the lens material, manufacturing process and application.

That is why development requires continual testing, learning and collaboration to find the right combination of properties for the specific customer and application.

CW: What does it take to move an optical coating innovation from a successful laboratory concept into scalable manufacturing?

Mercante: Scalability is part of the innovation conversation from the start.

A technology can perform exceptionally well in controlled laboratory conditions, but commercial success requires us to think about how that performance translates into a repeatable manufacturing process. That means considering equipment, application methods, process workflows, quality requirements and how a new solution integrates into a customer’s existing operation.

We see an emerging opportunity with digitized lens-coating solutions using additive manufacturing.  Additive manufacturing has the potential to move lens manufacturing forward with increased levels of customization, a reduced carbon footprint, and new designs that are not possible with conventional manufacturing.

What’s exciting about approaches like additive manufacturing is that they challenge us to rethink how coatings are applied and produced. That connection between material innovation and process innovation is where I think some of the most interesting opportunities are. For example, UV-cure materials that enable faster, low-energy curing are able to bring operational synergies to both lens substrates and coatings simultaneously; like in conventional processes, the full system must work together with the end consumer in mind.

CW: How could smart eyewear and other emerging optical applications change what manufacturers need from coatings?

Mercante: Smart eyewear is expanding what we expect a pair of glasses to do. We are moving from eyewear primarily as a vision-correction device toward products that can also help people interact with information and the world around them.

That raises the performance bar for the entire optical system.

Optical clarity remains critical because poor optical performance can negatively affect the user experience. At the same time, smart eyewear introduces increasingly sophisticated materials, components and manufacturing requirements. Our teams are looking at how optical materials and coatings that correct and protect vision can evolve alongside those technologies.

We also know that manufacturing technologies are evolving. UV-curable optical materials, for example, can enable lower-temperature processing to accommodate components such as sensors, waveguides, films, and complex optoelectronic integration within advanced lens designs for the rapidly growing smart eyewear and AR/VR segments.

For coatings manufacturers, the larger takeaway is that the end application is becoming more complex and requiring multi-material compatibility. As that happens, collaboration across the entire optical value chain becomes even more critical.

CW: You mentioned additive manufacturing. What opportunities do you see for digital manufacturing in optical coatings?

Mercante: I think additive manufacturing has the potential to change how we think about both the product and the process for creating the finished lens.

Traditionally, much of lens manufacturing has relied on subtractive processes. Additive manufacturing opens the door to using material more precisely, reducing waste and enabling greater customization. 

We are now seeing the potential for shorter production cycles, greater customization and manufacturing that could ultimately occur closer to the consumer. When combined with our UV-cure material technology, for example, additive manufacturing reduces monomer usage requirements to only the material needed for a particular lens rather than removing material from a larger lens blank.

Those are the kinds of changes that can simultaneously create value in performance, productivity and sustainability.

CW: Bringing specialized coating technologies to market can require expertise across many disciplines. How important is cross-functional collaboration to commercialization?

Mercante: It is essential.

One of the things I have learned throughout my career is that the best ideas do not have to originate with the person leading the organization. My job as a leader is to create an environment where the experts can be the experts and where they can tell us what is needed to succeed.

With a highly engineered product like an optical coating, R&D may understand what is technically possible. Operations knows what it will take to manufacture consistently. Supply chain understands what is required to support it at scale. Our commercial teams understand the market, and our customers bring another critical perspective because they know how the solution must perform in their own processes and applications.

Commercialization happens faster and more effectively when those groups are solving the problem together rather than sequentially.

That is also how I try to lead. Instead of starting with, “This isn’t possible,” I encourage our teams to ask, “What do we need to make this happen?”

CW: As you look ahead, where do you see the greatest opportunity for optical coatings innovation?

Mercante: I see opportunity at the intersection of performance, manufacturing innovation and emerging applications.

Optical coatings remain an area of growth, while technologies such as additive manufacturing are giving the industry new ways to think about how coatings can be applied. Innovations like smart eyewear are creating new expectations for the optical system itself.

Sustainability will be part of that evolution as well. The industry has already made progress through material choices, but the next opportunity is to examine the traditional processes used to manufacture optical products and reduce energy, cycle time and waste to create benefits without asking customers to compromise on quality or performance.

For me, that is what makes this space so exciting. We have decades of optical science and experience to build from, but the applications and manufacturing technologies around us are changing rapidly. That creates an opportunity to apply that expertise in entirely new ways.