Speciality chemicals company Lanxess has announced that it has developed a new colourant that can permanently colour polyamides (PA) and other plastics with the RAL 2003 shade of orange.
According to the company, the soluble organic dye Macrolex Orange HT is highly heat-stable, light fast and weather-resistant and offers outstanding colour strength and brilliance.
Vehicles with electric drives are naturally exposed to higher voltages and currents than combustion engines. Voltages of up to 400 V DC in the battery circuit and up to 1,000 V AC in the engine circuit are possible, with AC voltages exceeding 42V and DC voltages exceeding 60V already considered potentially life-threatening.
This is why the live components of an electric drive are coloured bright orange so that they can be quickly and easily identified. As a result, the new Macrolex Orange HT product helps to reduce the risk of accidents during the handling of electric motors.
Unlike most conventional dyes, Macrolex Orange HT is perfect for PA, and other common plastic types such as polycarbonate (PC) or polyphenylene sulfide (PPS), which are high processing temperatures normally pose a challenge for colourants. The new halogen-free colourant offers consistently high quality and high-precision colouration (dE ≤ 0.7), which is particularly important for orange shades. A colour difference of dE<1 cannot usually be perceived by the human eye. In addition, the new ‘high-voltage orange’ is cost-efficient thanks to its high colour strength.
In addition to high-voltage applications, Macrolex Orange HT can also be used to colour other high-quality plastic products such as housings for tools and other electronic devices and technical plastics for vehicle parts and structural applications.
Dr Lars May, Head of Application Technology Plastics in the Polymer Additives business unit, Lanxess, “We have already extensively tested our new products under realistic conditions. In cooperation with High Performance Materials business unit, we colored compounds with Macrolex Orange HT at the plastics technical center in Dormagen and tested them for their suitability in plastics processing.”