Most coating systems need good leveling and flow in order to have a nice appearance. Controlling the leveling and flow of a coating is all about controlling the surface tension of the system. A good leveling agent has low surface tension and low surface tension gradient. There are many surface defects that can appear because of surface tension problems:

Leveling & Orange peel, vertical and horizontal leveling

Craters or fish eyes

Substrate wetting

Edge crawling / framing effect

Telegraphing and Ghosting

Bernard Cells

Air draft sensitive

Over spray

To solve above problem the formulator can added the suitable leveling agent to the system. Before choose the suitable leveling agent, first the formulator has to know the problem of coating. There are 2 types of leveling agents: Polyacrylate: the polyacrylate have a good performance in leveling, defoaming, and not defect intercoat adhesion problem. Fluorocarbon modified polyacrylate or polyacrylate modified fluorocarbon: the fluorocarbon has good performance to substrate wetting and as anti-cratering. Fluorocarbon can maintain crater problem because of oil in interface substrate.