Paint & Coatings Industry - April 2008 - (Page 62)

Conquering Color Harmony M The Research eeting the demands of your customer is always challenging. Meeting the requirements of a premium car company such as BMW can be overwhelming. But apparently no challenge is too big for automotive components supplier Plastic Onmium and its team of industry experts. Over four years ago, Plastic Omnium began receiving requests from its customer base to improve color harmony and, beyond that, to measure and match color parameters on every part. Plastic Omnium went to work addressing these customer requests at its research center, Sigmatech, in France. In seeking partners for this research, Plastic Omnium formed a collaborative team with ABB, X-Rite and BASF to develop a state-of-the-art color harmony system named OPTIS. Plastic Omnium chose the X-Rite Car Flash spectrophotometer, and selected ABB as the robot supplier to be the core mechanical hardware components. Over the two-year development period, the team studied various key factors such as the angle, lighting and curvature of the part, to name a few. After endless controlled experiments, the team was successful in developing the system they desired. The OPTIS system could now read any part consistently and log the data to a file. During the development of the hardware, the team needed to identify a software program to read the data from the file and analyze the color position. Plastic Omnium looked at several software packages and chose the BASF ColorCARE™ program to make the OPTIS system complete. ColorCARE™ ColorCARE™ was chosen for four important reasons. First, BASF scientists wrote a special program to take the raw data and automatically load the information into ColorCARE™ – an important step in completing the automation. The custom loader automatically inputs a file consisting of time and date, part type, position, color, color position, and additional data directly into the ColorCARE™ system. “Plastic Omnium – Andersen is the only parts facility with fully automated import for color data,” said Patrick Fillon, Plastic Omnium lead engineer on the project. Secondly, the three-dimensional graphs allow the user to visually assess the changes for each reading. Graphing each color angle of the spectrophotometer for each reading of the part allows you to quickly see if any changes are happening to the system. The software also automatically determines if the color is within the parameters the user specifies. The third reason Plastic Omnium chose ColorCARE™ by BASF is the strong scripting language integrated into ColorCARE™. The scripting language of the color analysis tool is important because it allows the user to customize the types of information you are going to store and the color tolerances for each part. By Rick A. Doyle, BASF Product Manager | BASF Corporation, Southfield, MI 62 APRIL 2008 | W W W . P C I M A G . C O M http://WWW.PCIMAG.COM

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Paint & Coatings Industry - April 2008

Paint & Coatings Industry - April 2008 Contents Viewpoint Industry News Calendar of Events Company News Mergers and Acquisitions Names in the News Snapshots of Success – Automotive Applications Designing UV-Curable Materials for High-Temperature Optical Fiber Applications The Future of UV Coatings is Now! Milling Media Review Part 1 – Bead Density Effect Preparation and Properties of UV-Curable Polyurethane Acrylate Resins for Metal Surfaces Conquering Color Harmony High-Performance PU Crosslinkers for Two-Component Waterborne Applications Decorative Film Laminates How Long Will the Gilding Glitter? Gaining a Competitive Advantage Using Benchmarking Supplier Showcase Materials Watch Products and Literature Classifieds Advertiser Index Automotive Color Trends New England Museum Solves Century-Old Vanderbilt Mansion Mystery

Paint & Coatings Industry - April 2008

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.