Today’s consumer has become much more demanding, and this is a trend unlikely to be reversed. These demands obviously include enhanced product appearance, which extends even to utilitarian items. Colour is a very important element of appearance, and the paint industry has responded with a broad palette of beautiful colours for architectural finishes, as well as for highly prized items such as automobiles and pleasure marine craft.
In the past, coatings for heavy industrial structures always emphasized protective qualities over and above decorative qualities, and were generally offered in a limited colour range. The term ‘industrial colour match’ indicated that if the supplied colour was somewhere near the same hue as the desired colour, then that was all that could be expected for a heavy-duty protective coating.
This situation rarely exists in today’s world, and the protective coating supplier is expected to approach the other, above-named markets for colour offering and quality. Concentrated pigment pastes, which exhibit compatibility with a broad range of coatings chemistry, are a useful tool in achieving this goal, and we will examine the technology of such pastes in this presentation.