Hydrophilic coatings in non-medical applications

Whether it is due to some increased marketing efforts on my part, or just plain luck, I have noticed a good deal of calls coming in lately from people who are not in the medical field who would like to use a hydrophilic coating in a non-medical application.  Of course, I am always more than happy to help these people, if I can, but what often is the case is they cannot be helped.

Medical device coatings withstand some pretty good forces in some pretty tough environments..... relative to biological or physiological applications.  However, the forces and environments in the biological or medical field are orders of magnitude lower than those seen in non-medical fields.

You can coat a catheter with a hydrophilic coating, and you can put that catheter through perhaps 10 to 100 cycles depending on whose coating you are using and what your specific medical application is.  However, if you want to coat the inside of a pickup truck bed with this same coating so you can throw dirt and fertilizer on it on a hot summer day and then rinse it out with industrial cleaner.... you are not looking for the coatings we sell.  It may simply be an unintended effect of marketing these coatings that anyone gets the impression that they would be good in an extreme non-medical application like this one, but industrial folks would be better off understanding the different levels of "durable" that we talk about between industries and that they do not mean the same thing.  It's all relative.