Recorded Friday, June 3 at 10AM EDT – Presented by RTP Company
The perception of color by the human eye and brain is essential to conveying a mood or message. Color inspires, energizes, and builds brand recognition! Join RTP Company color experts as they discuss the science of color and the importance of color in maximizing brand impact for packaging and product design. Learn how custom and standard colored thermoplastic compounds and masterbatches can be precisely matched to your end-use requirements while ensuring consistent, global manufacturing. This webinar is for engineers, molders, sales representatives, and purchasers who want to better understand the science behind coloring plastics.
Presented by Anna Kreofsky, this 40 minute webinar will cover the following topics:
- Brief introduction to the RTP Company Color Division and how you can have Your Color – Your Way
- The biology of color perception
- The physics of wavelengths and how the spectral reflectance can be measured for color control
- The chemistries of colorants and why this is important
- How to evaluate color and control color tolerances in plastic
- Common color terms used to effectively communicate color across industries
- What information needs to be provided to color plastic manufacturers to ensure a satisfactory color match
Webinar Transcript
Anna: Welcome, good morning and good afternoon for those of you joining us from various time zones. I’m Anna Kreofsky, a color engineer at RTP Company today or at RTP Company. And today I will be presenting an introduction to color science titled Color Science 101.”
I’ll start with a brief introduction to RTP Company color division and then I’ll move into color fundamentals, [inaudible 00:01:21] the three sciences of color, colorant types and limitations, evaluation and control of color and effective color communication.
So RTP Company color division virtually colors all resin systems, thermal plastic systems, anywhere from polypropylene to peak [SP]. This is not just on filled resins but also modified resins. So those glass filled, flame retardant products as well. Our color group offers color in multiple different formats such as masterbatch, pre-colored resins, and cube blends. And I’m gonna explain those individually on upcoming slides. Our color group also offers advance color development. We offer standard [inaudible 00:02:13] colors along with custom colors. And we offer custom color matches under multiple different light sources and we have extensive regulatory knowledge. So whether your product needs to be UL compliant or USFDA or bio-[inaudible 00:02:27] based pigments, we can formulate according to those.
Globally, RTP Company has eight color labs. There’s three located in the United States, one in France, two in China, one in Singapore, and another one in Mexico. For color control, you’ll see here that we use consistent raw materials, hardware and software. And what we’ve done is created a global color database. In that way, we can share formulas very quickly.
Our labs offer a fast color matching service. So once a resin or a compound is specified, you can send in your color target and this can be done… You can develop your color locally and produce globally since we have our global facilities. And we can transfer these formulas readily. And for this reason we have a global color palette.
So there are three different coloring options, and the first one we have here is a masterbatch. And what a master batch is it’s a concentrated formula of colorants and other additives dispersed in a color matrix. And you can think of this as your cake mix where you buy a cake mix and you just need to need add water. So you’re just letting it down or add a defined ratio or percentage to color your material. Masterbatches are widely used in commodity resins where you buy a material in bulk but you wanna color it multiple different colors.
The next option is pre-color. This is where the colorants has been added to the compound and [inaudible 00:04:13] at RTP. So this is an as is, ready-to-use solution. There is no dilution. It’s used as 100%. And the cube blend, this is a master…or a combination of the masterbatch where it’s blended with the resin. And you can see down here in the bottom right-hand corner, that’s a replication of a cube blend wherein the masterbatch has been blended with the neat resin. Most the time you’ll see this used in our long fiber application because we’re unable to critically color inline. So blending that masterbatch with the long fiber pellets still aids…allows you to get that custom color with those materials.
So the color group is just one of the many product families within RTP Company. What we do best is work together and collaborate. So I work with these product groups listed here, the flame retarding group, conductive group, structural, where what the color group does is enhance the other properties that those other groups have provided. So with a structural product, maybe we’re working on a black nylon but the customer also wants it to be laser-markable. So that’s another kind of functional aspect to the color group.
That’s my very brief introduction to the color division. And now we’re gonna dive into the color fundamentals of this presentation. There’s three sciences which make up color and those are biology, physics, and chemistry. In the upcoming slides, you’ll learn on how they play a vital role in how we see color. So the three elements shown on the slide, we’re able to see color. All three must be present, and what you can see here is that this light source radiates energy or light, and then the light is reflected from an object to the observer. So what we see are the wavelengths which are reflected.
Download the full transcript here…
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