BASF paints the town gold-ish
15 Jan 2000
Capacity for BASF's speciality pigment Paliocrom Gold is to be boosted to 400 tonnes per year. These `special effect' pigments are used primarily in car finish paints, the company says.
The Paliocrom pigments are based on aluminium or mica particles. Their special properties result from depositing a thin layer of iron oxide on top of the flakes of aluminium or mica using chemical vapour deposition techniques. This layer diffracts light reflected from the flakes in an interference pattern, which gives the effect of look like mother-of-pearl or silk.
* Enzymes are the key factors in a new process developed by BASF to make a series of chiral intermediates used in drugs manufacture.
Developed at the company's Ludwigshafen laboratories, the process uses an acylase enzyme to make chiral amines, such as phenyl ethylamine. The enantiomeric excess is said to be over 98 per cent.
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