Investment in New Technology

In developing custom-designed colorant solutions for customers in the global paint and coatings industry, color accuracy is the first priority—but speed is also of the essence. Evonik's Colorants Product Line is now responding to customer demands for an increasingly shorter time to market by means of an investment: HTE (high throughput experimentation) technology. This highly automated experimentation set-up, located at the Maastricht facility to service the global Colorant business, will increase the quality of the experimental results as well as reduce the development time for colorant design.

“HTE reduces our time-to-market to a minimum, enabling maximum flexibility and rapid handling of lab work”, says Dr. Matthias Creutz, head of Evonik's Colorants business: “Research has shown that a critical success factor for Colorants customers is the time interval between the screening of a new colorant and its market launch. By investing in HTE we will set a new global standard in the colorant development process, thus providing our customers a clear advantage over their competitors.” Apart from greater flexibility and quicker results, HTE technology offers the additional advantage of further improvements in product quality.

Evonik uses the same standardized procedures throughout their R&D facilities located in the United States, the Netherlands, Australia, China, and Brazil. Managed by a global team of technical experts, the Colorants Product Line is able to deliver high-quality, consistent results direct to customers at local levels. “Our global networking of technical work is efficient due to the systematic pooling of our formulation and development results that HTE enables”, comments Creutz.

This investment in the global Colorants business offers customers enormous benefits in the development of new color solutions, and underscores Evonik's leadership position in the introduction of new colorant technologies.