Coatings manufacturers are constantly required to improve their products to keep up with market trends as well as to keep pace with their competitors. Raw material suppliers, in turn, have had to do the same, by developing and offering new, innovative products that fulfill coatings manufacturers’ requirements for performance and versatility. To that end, Orion has developed a portfolio of new, high-performance grades for coatings. The jettest of these grades is COLOUR BLACK FW 255 (formerly XPB 255).
COLOUR BLACK FW 255, an after-treated carbon black pigment, is characterized by a very narrow distribution of mean primary particle size, as well as a narrow distribution of both primary particle and aggregate size. The after-treatment process generates a functional surface with oxygen-containing groups. When incorporated into a coating system, these groups induce better wetting and dispersion properties. This allows the pigment to impart a more desirable hue and higher level of jetness. Table 1 lists the jetness and hue calculations. An enhanced interaction with polar binders significantly improves the stabilization of carbon black pigments. The volatile content or degree of oxidization is often used to characterize oxygen-containing surface groups. FW 255 has 12% volatile matter at 950 °C.