Every time you push the solids content of a titanium dioxide paste up a notch, viscosity pushes straight back, the bead mill trips on current, fineness will not come down, and a batch grinds all the way to end of shift still coarse. Capacity stalls at the dispersion step.
Chemi Tech makes polymeric dispersants for titanium dioxide pastes, epoxy primers and high-solids industrial coating systems, from the KMT series. How to match one depends on the pigment's surface treatment, the resin system and the target solids content. Sulphate-process and chloride-process titanium dioxide carry different coatings and each takes its own grade; acrylic and epoxy systems are treated separately as well. Send us the formulation and the target solids content and we will check those variables against each other before giving you an answer, which saves you working through it one notch at a time.
Chemi Tech Dispersant Advantages
The KMT series grade anchors to the titanium dioxide surface through its anchoring groups and does not desorb under high-shear grinding, which is exactly where high-solids systems live or die. The viscosity drop is substantial: at the same solids content the paste flows better, the mill can actually pull it in and the current holds steady. It tolerates a wide range of coated titanium dioxide grades, so switching pigment supplier does not mean rewriting the formulation. Dosage runs at a small percentage on pigment weight, which puts total cost well under imported options with performance to match. And the milled paste stores stably: two weeks in, fineness has not moved.
A note from Chemi Tech: the figures above come from typical high-solids titanium dioxide paste conditions. Change the pigment's surface treatment and the results move. Run a small-scale trial before scaling up.
Industry Pain Points and Solutions
When a high-solids paste thickens, eight times out of ten the fault is not the equipment. It is whether the dispersant can hold on to the pigment.
The first trap is blaming the machine. The current runs high, so a report goes in asking for a new bead mill; the budget gets spent and the paste is still thick. Our approach is to run a viscosity comparison between an undosed batch and a dispersant-dosed batch first and settle the numbers before anyone talks about equipment. At that point most plants find they do not need to replace anything.
The second trap is changing pigment without changing the formulation. A new titanium dioxide supplier means a different coating, the existing dispersant does not grip the new pigment, and grinding efficiency quietly drops. Our approach is to run an anchoring verification round on each of the pigments you actually use and let the formulation follow the pigment.
The third trap is judging by fineness on the day. The batch mills to spec, then two weeks later the paste has gone coarse again and a complaint comes back from the customer opening the drum. Our approach is to put heat storage stability into the verification scope and to answer to shelf life rather than to the number on the day of discharge.
Those three steps are ours to walk with you: a gradient bench trial on your pigment and resin first, then a pilot run on the bead mill, and finally dosage, addition stage and grinding parameters settled together. What the plant receives is a set of parameters it can run as written.
Typical Conditions and Verification
Customer: an industrial coatings manufacturer in Hunan, applied to titanium dioxide paste preparation for high-solids epoxy primer.
This plant wanted to raise the solids content of its titanium dioxide paste to cut solvent use and freight, tried a round, hit current alarms and missed fineness, and rolled back. The solution Chemi Tech's dispersant team provided was: a strongly anchoring grade selected from the KMT series against the pigment's coating type and the epoxy system; a comparison against an undosed batch first to confirm where the problem actually sat; then a pilot run on the bead mill. After the change the solids content came up, grinding current returned to its normal band, capacity on the same mill rose by roughly thirty percent per batch, and a retained sample at two weeks showed no loss of fineness. The equipment department withdrew its request for a new bead mill.
FAQ
With a dispersant in, can I push solids content up another notch?
How far it can go depends on the pigment's surface treatment and the resin system. Forcing it just produces runaway viscosity and a paste that coarsens in storage. What we do for coatings plants is run a gradient bench trial and lay out the viscosity and fineness that go with each solids level, so the safe window is obvious at a glance. Give our technical engineers the pigment grades you run and your formulation backbone and we will produce the gradient data. Where it can go, the conclusion goes straight to the plant.