The Navy and MPI: A History Lesson
The Navy’s love affair with paint has spanned centuries, and in its heyday involved a robust program for paint chemists and labs to develop and manage their paint standards. These Navy and US federal paint standards were based on the chemical composition of a paint and bore names like TT-E-489 Enamel, Alkyd, Gloss, Low VOC Content; TT-P-29 Paint, Latex; A-A-2962 Enamel, Alkyd; etc.
Towards the end of the 1990s, the US government determined it was cost-prohibitive to run their own paint lab and test regimen, so a presidential order directed the Navy to seek out and adopt the best available alternative system of paint standards. MPI offered two critical advantages over the Navy/federal program:
- MPI’s performance-based standards
Traditional paint standards were composition-based: they essentially prescribed a recipe for a latex paint, alkyd paint, etc. and most were for product types with well-established performances and service lives. This approach worked well enough for an industry that had been producing the same technologies for decades, but proved to be a liability and a straitjacket when the industry made the leap forward to develop new chemistries for lower VOC products that had no track record of performance in the field.
By contrast, MPI standards define the level of performance the product should provide – e.g. ‘what good looks like’ -- based on an exacting regimen of tests tailored to each type of coating. And while MPI standards are classified around basic paint types — alkyd versus latex, clear versus pigmented —the requirements to pass MPI standards are virtually agnostic to the paint’s composition. MPI’s protocol of approving products based on their performance gave specifiers an invaluable compass with which to navigate the sea of new low VOC and water-based products flooding the market.
- MPI had a strong lab testing/approval program: products approved by MPI were proprietary paints supplied by a wide range of industry suppliers with distribution capabilities across the US and Canada. So MPI’s Approved Products List offered the Navy ready access to source the products they needed.
The Chief Architect of the US Navy invited MPI’s Bob Welch and Barry Law to Norfolk VA to meet with Navy leaders in the same board room where the Gulf War was planned. Over the course of three days, Navy paint experts reviewed every test in every MPI standard, seeking justification from Bob and Barry for each requirement. Satisfied with their responses, the decision was made for the Navy to adopt MPI standards and Approved Products Lists.
MPI has maintained a close relationship with Navy ever since, and in 2018 took over the Navy’s standards for epoxy interior steel fuel tank coatings, dubbing the new standards MPI #500 for the primer and MPI #501 for the topcoat.
