Most repairs fail twice. Once when the part breaks, and again when the repair does.
The problem IPI was built to solve
The founder
Ergun Kirlikovali
IPI exists because of a question its founder started asking in the early 1970s: why should a repair material have to inherit the weaknesses of the chemistry it is made from?
Every polymer family available to industry came with a trade-off that a maintenance engineer had to live with. Epoxy gave you an outstanding bond, then chalked in sunlight and cracked when the substrate moved. Urethane moved beautifully with the part, then took on water and blistered. Acrylic weathered for years, then shrank and refused to bond to anything damp. You picked which failure you could tolerate.
Interpenetrating polymer networks offered a way out of that choice. Cure two crosslinked networks through one another and they entangle rather than bond — neither can be pulled out without breaking the other. That structure lets a formulator keep the properties worth having and leave the failure modes behind.
The theory was well documented in the polymer literature. Turning it into something a millwright could mix on a factory floor, at ambient temperature, in a kit that had been proportioned at the factory, was the work of the next fifteen years.
1985
A company, in Santa Ana
Integrated Polymer Industries was founded in 1985 to sell that work as products rather than papers. From the first formulation the systems were zero-VOC — no solvents, low to no odour — at a time when nothing in the market required it and most competitors were still shipping product that needed a respirator and a ventilated bay.
That decision was not made for a regulator. It was made because a repair you cannot perform inside a running plant, next to people who have to keep working, is not really a repair. It is a shutdown.
By the late 1980s IPI was applying IPN chemistry to protective coatings, an application the industry had not pursued. The company has operated from Irvine, California since, with research, development, marketing and training under one roof.
How we work
We would rather lose the order than sell the wrong kit
IPI products are engineered solutions to specific industrial problems, and they require trained professionals to apply properly. Substrate condition, surface preparation, mixing, cure and service conditions all decide whether the repair holds — and all of them sit on your side of the transaction, not ours.
So the first call is diagnostic, not commercial. Tell us what broke, what it is made of and what it has to survive. If one of our eleven groups is right for it, we will tell you which and how to apply it. If none of them is, we will say that too. A failed repair costs you a shutdown and costs us a customer of twenty years, and those are not comparable numbers.
Training programmes are run from Irvine, and technical help comes with the product rather than as an extra.
Early 1970s
Founder’s research into interpenetrating polymer networks begins.
1985
Integrated Polymer Industries founded in Santa Ana, California, on zero-VOC systems.
1986
IPI-Advanced Polymer Concrete enters the market.
Late 1980s
IPI pioneers the application of IPN chemistry to protective coatings.
Since
Eleven product groups in continuous commercial supply, from pulp and paper mills across North America to aerospace and defence programmes.