System stops strips sliding away
15 Jan 2000
The claret and blue of West Ham... the Royal blue of Everton... the red of Manchester United... football teams might change their strip designs every fortnight these days, but the colours remain the same. After all, if Manchester United were the Pink Devils, they'd probably never win anything.
To help avoid this embarrassing fate, Yorkshire Chemicals has installed a system to make sure that dye colours are always exactly the right shade.
The company's plant in Leeds makes a variety of dyes, including the water insoluble disperse dyes used to colour the polyesters and poly/cotton mixes used in sports strips. Problems can occur when the dyes crystallise different crystal structures, called polymorphs, form during the production process, and these have to be isolated at a certain stage of the process to ensure that unstable polymorphs don't end up in the final mixture. If this happens, the dye could be imperfectly coloured or, worse, give a spotty finish.
The new system, supplied by Mettler-Toledo, consists of a differential scanning calorimeter and a robotic sample changer. This removes samples from the product stream and analyses them for the presence of polymorphs. According to Yorkshire Chemicals' technical manager Mike Hebden, the system is so simple to operate that, unlike most footballers, it can be left unattended overnight and at weekends.
