Different Types Of Pigments For Paint And Coating

In today’s world, there’s a big number of pigments accessible. Following the introduction of synthetic pigments, various categories of pigments has evolved that are suitable to particular kinds of industries. Let’s discuss about the kind of pigments briefly.

Inorganic pigments:

This type of pigments are developed via chemical manufacturing instead of grinding & washing minerals or clay taken directly from the earth. The preparation procedure is also very simple and comprise the steps of cleaning, drying, pulverizing and blending into a formulation. Few Examples of inorganic pigments: lead oxide, cobalt blue, chromium oxide, cadmium yellow, and nickel titanate. Almost all of the inorganic mineral pigments used today are manufactured, or synthetic. A synthetic version of a pigment may be chemically identical to the natural form, but it is produced artificially rather than naturally. It may also be an entirely new pigment created from minerals.

Organic pigments:

Organic Pigments are chemically synthesized, as they are not found in nature. They contain carbon and comes with relatively low levels of toxicity, not providing any major environmental concern. Raw materials can include coal tar and petroleum distillates that are transformed into insoluble precipitates. They are used as mass colorants and are popular in plastics, synthetic fibers and as surface coatings-paints and inks. In recent years the organic pigments are used for hi-tech applications that includes photo-reprographics, opto-electronic displays and optical data storage.

Key features & characteristics of Organic Pigments

• Good tinctorial strength

• Cost effectiveness

• Consistency and unique shades

• Completely non-toxic

• Organic pigments shows good color strength

• Very good stability to solvents, light, heat, and weathering

• Very bright, pure, rich colors

Metallic pigments:

Metallic Pigments give bright effects, due to this they are widely used and are a very popular category of pigments. Metallic pigments, can be of two types aluminum and zinc.

Because many of these new pigments for paints were less costly, and because there have been dramatic improvements on the range of available colors, many of them were made available before rigorous testing for bleeding was performed. For those painters for whom bleeding of one color into another, no matter how slight, is a problem, a simple, but not conclusive, bleed test can be performed.

The new, synthetic pigments for coatings are still derived from such natural substances as petroleum, but they have been chemically modified to create a new substance that is unnatural to the environment and, to many, has an unnatural appearance. Many of these colors, because of their industrial applications, are now part of our cities’ visual environment, our synthetic environment.