Liquid colour concentrates
Our up to 100% bio-based functional carrier fluids and polymeric dispersants offer a universal and sustainable way to enhance the colour and stability of liquid colour concentrates.
What are liquid colour concentrates?
Liquid colour concentrates, also known as liquid masterbatches or liquid colourants, are made up of pigments and additives dispersed in a liquid carrier that are mixed into plastics to impart colour. Liquid colourants offer several advantages over solid colourants including:
- Faster colour development
- Improved colour dispersion and consistency
- Lower energy consumption during production
Functional carrier fluids & polymeric dispersants
Our functional carrier fluids and polymeric dispersants offer a universal and sustainable approach to colourful plastics. An increased demand in consumer packaging, more focus on automotive lightweighting and improved manufacturing efficiency requirements are all contributing to growth in the liquid masterbatch market. Liquid colour masterbatch also offers benefits over solid colour masterbatch, such as:
- Being ideal for transparent and dilute shades
- Particular suitability for PET due to low addition rates
- Being less equipment intensive
- Compatibility with a broader range of polymers
The 100% bio-based ECO range of carrier fluids
Why choose our polymeric dispersants?
Polymeric dispersants are added to pigment dispersions to improve the separation of particles, maximise loading, and to prevent settling and re-agglomeration. Our polymeric dispersants offer a high affinity to pigments, multiple anchoring points, excellent adsorption, and a large steric barrier. These benefits lead to:
- Faster dispersion
- Significant viscosity reduction
- Increased solids loading
- Superior stability
- Improved colour development
Our technical team can advise you on the best dispersant for the pigment you are working with.
Synergistic effect of our carrier fluids & dispersants
Our functional carrier fluids can be combined with our Zephrym dispersants to enhance the overall performance of liquid colour dispersions. When used together compared to individually, they can achieve:
- Higher pigment loading
- Improved stability for consistent colour development
- Faster colour development from organic pigments, leading to energy and time savings during pigment milling
- Gloss or matte dispersions with no greasiness, hazing or yellowing
How to improve dispersion & stability of liquid colour concentrates
Zephrym dispersants rapidly reduce particle size of the pigment whilst improving stability of the dispersion so that it is homogenous, without any separation.
In this dispersion of 70% titanium dioxide RFC6 in mineral oil you can see that the dispersion on the left containing 5% Zephrym PD 2206 shows no separation and increased homogenous behavior compared to the dispersion on the right that contains no dispersant.