Tundra seeks partner for heat-resistant vinyl siding

Tundra Companies, a materials maker in White Bear Lake, Minn., says it has developed a heat resistant fiber-reinforced composite that solves the problem of vinyl siding warping from intense sunlight that reflects off a neighbor's energy-efficient window.

Founded in 2004 by Kurt Heikkila, a former senior vice president of technology for Andersen Windows who has 80-plus patents to his credit, Tundra's core competency is coatings.

With 83 employees, mostly scientists, Tundra introduced its proprietary Nanokoat technology this year and is looking to partner with PVC product manufacturers, particularly of vinyl siding.

The company calls materials with the special coating its Eklipse platform. Tundra can blend a Nanokoat-ed particle with PVC to make it better, CEO Thomas Kaiser, the former president of Cardinal Glass Industries Inc., said in a telephone interview.

"By better, I mean it can take the punch coming from the sun or these high-tech coatings on glass but still be sensitive to weight, ease of install and cost," Kaiser said. Eklipse materials are delivered in a pelletized form ready for extrusion or other processes.

Tundra has a partner in the fenestration industry that plans to use Eklipse to compete against vinyl windows. Kaiser described the partner as a large window manufacturer in North America that has no vinyl product.

"Because we're ex-window people, this national player came to us with a request," Kaiser said. "They asked us to come up with a new material that wasn't a me-too material but was designed for them to be different and better and exceed requirements, beat competitors and still be sensitive to economics."

Tundra can do the same for vinyl cladding makers, Kaiser said.

The company's technology is centered on an ability to coat almost any particle — be it stainless steel, tungsten, nylon, glass fiber — to go on PVC or polypropylene.

"The coating will go on to whatever it is introduced," Kaiser explained. "As a result, that particle can be combined to make something different or better, and by better that could be stronger, more heat-resistant, lower cost or all of the above. It depends on the application or end use sought. Tundra's science then goes to work and says, 'Let's see if we can disrupt things a bit in order to make improvements and create differentiation."

Most vinyl siding is designed to withstand temperatures of about 160° F, Kaiser said. However, a time-lapse video on the company website shows "industry standard" vinyl siding beginning to disfigure sooner. The siding was exposed to various high temperatures for an hour. It began bubbling at 145-150° F and buckling near 230° F, which the announcer calls "catastrophic failure."

Another video shows the Eklipse material withstanding 238° F. Kaiser said the material can handle up to 240° F, which should prevent the siding from deforming due to solar reflection.

Eklipse could open new markets for cladding manufacturers in southern states like Florida, Texas and Arizona — places where "vinyl siding hasn't been able to play in simply because of the limitations of the material," Kaiser said.

Tundra's material does cost a little more than base PVC by "a few percentage points," he also said. Company representatives are out knocking on doors to find partners.

"We want to say here's what we've got to the heavy weights, like a Ply Gem or CertainTeed or an Associated Materials or a Kaycan," Kaiser said. "We're visiting these folks to say here's the testing we've done. Feel free to test it yourself, but we're third-party tested. We're not biased."

Ply Gem Holdings Inc. says it has the best protection in the industry when it comes to guarding against fading and heat distortion. Last year, the Cary, N.C.-based company came out with new dark colors of red brick, mahogany and brandy siding that use a patent-pending reflective chemistry called SolarDefense.

The company says the formulation significantly reduces heat absorption. Ply Gem CEO Gary Robinette said he is pleased with sales of siding with SolarDefense during the May 8 quarterly conference call with investment bankers.

"It comes in very dark colors, so it is kind of spot-on in terms of the trends and that product has really been a home run in the vinyl siding market," Robinette said.

Also last year, Huntsman Corp., a chemicals manufacturer based in The Woodlands, Texas, added a pigment to its Altiris family of products for exterior building applications. The company says the pigment boosts the solar reflectance of white, bright and light-colored plastics by up to 25 percent, which enhances thermal stability, weather resistance and durability.

The product portfolio already included Huntsman's pigment ranges for mid- and dark-colored plastic surfaces.

Until recently, solar reflective pigments were an optional item in the plastic formulation toolbox, but that is changing as manufacturers look to improve their product performance and durability, according to Russell Evans, a business development director for Huntsman, which is merging with Clairant International Ltd. later this year.

"Formulations including Altiris pigments can increase the level of solar reflectance, which is an important factor affecting both physical and mechanical damage of plastic construction materials," Evans said in an email. "The technology works by improving the temperature control capabilities of plastic materials, by reflecting more of the sunlight and reducing the energy, which gets converted into heat, which in turn reduces the risk of material deformation."

Huntsman describes the newest pigment as having a large crystal size of 400 nanometers, which reflects more infrared light, and a macro titanium dioxide core, dense silica shell and alumina outer coating. A number of leading vinyl siding producers use Alteris pigments, but the company says none can be identified because of confidentiality clauses.

As Tundra looks for a vinyl siding partner, the company is getting questions about how Eklipse materials will process and whether it might damage machines. Kaiser said it won't hurt extruders or other processing equipment.

"It can be injection molded. That's rare," Kaiser said. "Up to now, people have been highly fearful of a PVC with a filler because in past lives when they tried, it had torn up their nozzles and equipment. The coating in this instance acts almost like a lubricant."

Tundra also could face some industry resistance. Solar reflection has damaged parked cars, patio furniture, pool covers, plants, grass, bicycle seats and doormats, in addition to vinyl siding. In one widely publicized case, the side mirror and interior panels of a Jaguar melted after it was parked across the street from a glass-covered skyscraper in London for about two hours in August 2013. The building developers paid for the car repairs and installed a brise-soleil sunshade to prevent the problem, which they determined was caused by a certain elevation of the sun that happened about two hours a day for a three-week period.

The Vinyl Siding Institute, a Washington-based trade group, recommends the use of window screens, awnings and strategically placed trees and shrubs to block or diffuse the path of sunlight and protect against solar reflection. VSI says the problem involves an infrequent and complex set circumstances with the angle of the sun, window curvature, time of day and year, and distance between the window and object. All these factors contribute to the reflection of normal sunlight as a beam of concentrated energy that exceeds 200° F and damages all kinds of property, according to VSI President Kate Offringa.

"The vinyl siding industry always welcomes innovation," Offringa said in an email about Tundra's proposed solution. "What concerns us is the inaccurate characterization that concentrated solar reflection is an issue for which cladding makers need to do more, when so many other materials are also damaged by solar reflection."

In 2010, the National Association of Home Builders reported that the presence of concavity in ​ double glass panes appears to be the primary cause of heat generation more than the increased reflectivity of low-emissivity windows. A window can collapse into a concave shape from the difference in barometric glass panes. The gas helps keep passive solar heat in houses in northern climates, and it could escape through the tubes.

"Then, the window no longer satisfies building codes because it loses the inert gas inserted to improve the windows U-value [rate of heat loss]," Kaiser said. "As a result, you help one issue but then you're noncompliant with another."

Cladding manufacturers should take more steps to guard against solar reflection, he continued, saying, "The window folks aren't going to say, 'No problem, siding people. We'll make our windows less efficient because you can't make your material better.'"

While NAHB does list heat-resistant vinyl siding as a possible solution to concentrated solar reflection, it also points back to window makers in a section about double-strength glass. This glass, which is 1/8-inch thick as opposed to 3/32-inch thick, doesn't cost much more and keeps a flatter surface that "would lessen the possibility that a concavity will occur in the glass panes and lessen the chance that reflected sunlight will be focused and cause damage to nearby vinyl siding."

Kaiser said one of the challenges of rolling out new building products has been unintended consequences like solar reflection.

"It forces everybody to think through what they can do to improve their products or make changes to keep with the times," he said.