As the recent holiday shopping season shows, sometimes all it comes down to when a consumer decides between products is the color.  Imagine row after row of plastic products – toys on a shelf, blenders for the kitchen, organizing shelves for the home office.  What often makes the difference in choice once the product features are decided upon is the color.  In fact, marketing research shows that for some consumers, color alone will drive purchasing, which has led some industries to explore colored store interiors as an option to increase sales.

However plastics processing and coloring, particularly while in a melt stream, is one of the most complex of all mixing jobs.  This material is considered to be shear sensitive (PVC, for instance), and the typical design in the typical melting process often suffers from “unmelt” – or unmelted pellets in the molded parts.  Another symptom of the difficulty in this mixing process is “color swirl” – particularly noticeable in polycarbonate and other high –viscosity polymers.

While many molders have improved designs, the resin melt rates and the various plastics melt rates still remain a problem; if the melt temperature is too high, the polymer will degrade.  Some melt temperatures will generate other byproducts, such as formaldehyde, that must be dealt with.  Fortunately, resorting to poor material selection strategies just to achieve certain color concentrations is unnecessary.  Komax’s Introduction and Distribution Device is an innovative design utilizing cylindrical pipes to combine mixing elements solves many of the problems of convention static mixer systems for shear sensitive materials.

If your business requires mixing consistency and color is critical for your profits, then you owe it to yourself to see how Komax can provide an upgrade to your products and reduce your loss rate from inconsistent coloring or polymer degradation.