Dr Raphael Schaller
Head of Technology
Raphael began his career as a technician in synthetic materials at Sika AG and Johnson Electric, both based in Switzerland. He pursued undergraduate studies in Materials Science at ETH Zurich and Queen Mary University London, earning his master’s degree in 2012. In 2013, Raphael commenced his doctoral studies in polymer science at ETH Zurich, focusing on ‘Creating Complex Polymer Systems – From Polyethylene Al Dente to Polystyrene Mille‐Feuille’. Following his Ph.D., he conducted postdoctoral research in Switzerland and China in 2016. In January 2017, Raphael joined nolax, a Swiss start-up hub for adhesive technologies, where he founded the start-up ‘Thin-ply’. By October 2018, he took over the role of Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at nolax. Since January 2024, Raphael has served as CTO at Collano AG, a Swiss specialty adhesives manufacturer.
Against the Wind: How 2026 Results Overturned Our 2022 Hypothesis
In the autumn of 2019, seven racing boats departed Le Havre carrying sails built from a new generation of fiber-reinforced adhesive films. The matrix: An adhesive based on ethylene–acrylic acid copolymer blended with an aliphatic polyether-polyurethane to improve the flexibility. The regatta was the Transat Jacques Vabre. The destination: Salvador de Bahia, 4,350 nautical miles across the Atlantic. The conditions were everything a polymer chemist fears in silence — cyclic thermal loading, relentless UV irradiation, high mechanical stress, and repeated wetting and drying. And the fears became reality — some sails delaminated.
At WAC 2022 in Chicago, we presented the failure as an endurance case study. We named temperature cycling as the probable root cause, pointing to the progressive degradation of the polyurethane component. We showed alternating climate test data, watched integrity of sails collapse after twenty cycles, and offered a hypothesis. It was an honest hypothesis. It was not the full answer.
Four years of further investigation have since revealed what the sea already knew. The dominant failure mechanism is not thermal fatigue but viscoelastic creep under sustained mechanical load — a slow, silent re-distribution of stress at the fiber-adhesive interface. Armed with this understanding, we developed a next-generation adhesive for sail membranes: a polyurethane-polycarbonate crosslinked with a 2,4-toluene diisocyanate dimer (TDI-dimer), combining the robustness of a polycarbonate backbone with the latent reactivity of the crosslinker — storage-stable at room temperature and field-validated in offshore competition.
This presentation delivers the answer we could not give in Chicago. It details the true failure mechanism of the 2019 Transat Jacques Vabre delamination, unpacks the chemistry behind the latest formulation, and presents field validation data from the latest offshore regattas. There is no more reason for fears, and the loop is closed.
Breakout IV – From Evidence to Impact: Future-Proofing Industry – 16 September 2026 – 17:00 – 17:30 – Room Mountbatten – F6