In developing custom-designed color 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 a million-euro investment: HTE (high throughput experimentation) technology. This highly automated experimentation at its Maastricht facility to service its global Colorant business, will increase the quality of the 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,” said 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’s Colorants Product Line uses the same standardized procedures throughout their R&D facilities located in the U.S., 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 will be even more efficient due to the systematic pooling of our formulation and development results that HTE enables,” Creutz added.