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MUMBAI: Eiffel Tower is getting a new look for its 120th birthday. Bayferrox pigments from the specialty chemicals group LANXESS AG provide the color for the Paris trade¬mark’s high-grade anticorrosion coating. The iron oxides offer maximum light and weather stability, high tinting strength and chemical resistance in addition to outstanding coverage.

The understated shade, which harmonizes with the rooftops and monuments of Paris, is a blend of three different brown grades from the LANXESS’s Bayferrox range of iron oxides. “The tower has been the same color since 1968,” says Jean-Bernard Bros, President of SETE (Société d’Exploitation de la Tour Eiffel), the compa¬ny that operates the tower, “and artists, photographers and all those who love the Eiffel Tower agree that it is the tower’s best color.”

The premium pigments from LANXESS can be easily intermixed with processed with nearly no dust formation. In addition, the products, distinguished by their high quality, are easy and environmentally friendly to process, the company said.

According to Dr. Volker Schneider, Head of Competence Center Paint in the Business Unit Inorganic Pigments at LANXESS, “The decisive advantages of our high-performance products are the tight tolerances with respect to shade and tinting strength. This makes color reproduction when formulating paints and coatings faster, easier and more reliable; in many cases there is no need for shading work.”
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As ordered by builder Gustave Eiffel, the French emblem is repainted every seven years. For this purpose, 60 tons of corrosion inhibitor are applied by 25 painters using 1,500 brushes and rollers during the renovation period of 18 months. The new coat for a total of 250,000 square meters of steel costs around four million Euros. Painting is to be completed by the fall of 2010.

Regular painting is required because weathering and environmental effects are constantly eroding the paint. Of the 60 tons currently being applied to the steel structure, only around ten tons will remain after seven years. The Eiffel Tower already has 18 layers of paint. Colors range from the first coating in “Venetian Red” through shades of yellow to today’s “Eiffel Tower Brown”.

The painters working for Stelma, the Greek company that won the contract for the project, are applying the anticorrosion system based on urethanized alkyd resin in two coats. Just like seven years ago, the Sandefjord, Norway-based coatings formulator Jotun is supplying the Mammut RQ system, which comprises a primer and a topcoat. “We are honored that our coating materials have been selected to protect this unique feat of engineering,” said Jean-Francois Ferrer, General Manager of Jotun France SAS.

The Inorganic Pigments business unit belongs to the LANXESS Performance Chemicals segment, which achieved total sales in fiscal 2008 of EUR 1,930 million. (IndiaPRWire)

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