Using Benchtop Spectrophotometers for Quality Control in the Plastics Industry

Benchtop spectrophotometers are the tool of choice for blown, extruded, and molded plastic products. The instrument allows manufacturers to measure a product’s color at points across the full range of development and manufacturing steps, ensuring a consistent color on finished items. Benchtop Spectrophotometers measure a product’s transmitted and reflected color, yellowness, and haze. The instruments provide operators with numerical values to correlate with a visual inspection.

Our CM-36dG Benchtop Spectrophotometer is a highly accurate unit that can simultaneously measure color and true gloss, making it ideal for QC and formulation applications in plastics. It can also measure various plastic surfaces such as; solids, pellets, films, translucent and opaque samples for precise color measurement.

The CM-36dG is designed to work with Colibri®, an efficient, powerful, and easy-to-use modular software suite that can handle all your needs from color specification to formulation and QC. Colibri uses a single central database, which allows users to customize with modules and add-ons pertinent to the needs of their business.

Accurate recipe predictions can reduce R&D and production costs by minimizing the use of expensive colorants when attempting to formulate recipes. Using the CM-36dG with Colibri, the entire supply chain can have fast and controlled access to shared data, internally or externally online, with increased benefits from improved color communication.

Additionally, the device is compatible with SpectraMagic NX2 software, so users can see multiple data views that they can then edit. Two or more secondary targets can be connected with the primary target’s data, enabling many quality control applications. When looking at the need to obtain accurate color measurement data, it is interesting to note that the International Color Consortium has set forth rigorous guidelines on the appearance of colors. When a plastics manufacturer goes for one of these standard colors, a benchtop spectrophotometer allows them to program the correct color and measure all other products down the line against it.

Thanks to highly advanced technology, the plastics industry can perform amazingly accurate color measurements that even just a few years ago would not have been possible.

If you would like to know about Konica Minolta benchtop spectrophotometers, please contact us through our website.