Research leads to progress. More than sixty years ago, at the time when the FPL founded the Research Institute for Pigments and Coatings (Forschungsinstitut für Pigmente und Lacke) in Stuttgart, the scientific background of paints and coating materials as well as the coatings produced from these substances was very scanty. Throughout the six decades of its existence and several hundreds of single projects, the FPL created a broad scientific basis for the understanding of reciprocal effects within coatings, interactions of substrates, corrosion protection, coating properties and their metrological determination.

As an answer to the many practical research tasks, new application-oriented testing methods were developed and material correlations were presented in detail by the institute by means of state-of-the-art physicochemical methods. The close partnership with the University of Stuttgart has enabled the introduction and education of hundreds of young scientists to the topic of coating systems successfully. The FPL in Stuttgart is one of the international top addresses for research in the field of coating systems.

The integration of the institute into the Fraunhofer Society at the beginning of the year 2010 confirms this approach. In future we will provide our industrial partners with all steps of processing that belong to the value chain, from one partner belonging to one of the most competent German research facilities, the Fraunhofer Society.

The FPL, together with the IPA and further institutes, will play an active part in the choice of topics concerning coatings. It will have an influence on funded projects and provide its members with a decisive competitive edge ahead of schedule in terms of precompetitive joint research.