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Black Pigments: A Color or Lack Thereof?
Understanding Shepherd Color’s Highly Engineered Black Pigments
Black – is it a color or lack of color? What we know at Shepherd Color is that we have a type of black pigment that is black and stays black in the harshest heat, ultraviolet (UV), and other extreme conditions. Specifically, the C.I. Pigment Black 28, copper chromite (III), that has been used for decades when other black pigments fail. Useful in glass and porcelain enamels because of its heat-stability, it is the premier black pigmentation for coil and extrusion coatings because of its dispersion stability. Also, a stable black for use in engineering plastics and food packaging.
Shepherd Color has a wide range of products based on this chemistry that differ physically by particle size and therefore by the balance of masstone color and tint strength. The larger particle sized Black 1 and Black 1G are great for masstone applications like high heat coatings. Examples of this are porcelain enamel for BBQ grills and cookware. Their particle size and heat stability make them the standard for use in glass enamels. The black dotted border around your windshield in your car is likely one of our black pigments. Architectural glass panels use our black to hide the interior machinery in buildings.
Besides great masstone colors, our grades with smaller particle size are optimized for tint applications. Our Black 430 gives you a cool, blue-shade tint, that is highly controllable and stable to shear conditions as found in applications like coil coatings. Black 430 is also compliant for food packaging.
The ultimate product is our Dynamix Black 30C965. This pigment has an elevated durability and the highest tint strength along with the easily-dispersed properties of our Dynamix technology. You don’t need to use the time-consuming variable, and expensive pigment grinding step in a small-media mill to get a full dispersion in liquid coatings. A high-shear mixer brings Dynamix 30C965 to full dispersion in a wide range of solvent and water-borne coatings. All without bringing any organic dispersants that might degrade the high-heat and weatherability properties.
Need a black pigment solution?
The C.I. Pigment Black 28 chemistry can also be modified with the inclusion of some manganese in the formulation. While this modification does remove the FDA compliance for food packaging and reduces the acid resistance slightly, it increases the tint strength while increasing the masstone jetness. Our Black 10G982 and Black 20C920 are excellent black pigments for all but the longest warrantied coatings.
Shepherd Color’s C.I. Pigment Black 28 pigments come in a variety of versions tailored for your specific applications. If you are producing high-temperature coatings, coil and extrusion, powder coatings, glass and porcelain enamels, engineering plastics, or other high-performance coatings or plastics, please contact us for the best solution for your application.
The September 2024 edition of European Coatings picked up this article as a feature, read it here!
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