Development Of Red And Blue Gel Ink

The advantages of both fountain pen and traditional ball pen were combined on the gel ink pen. The gel ink pen is a new kind of writing tool and very popular in the world. China had the largest producing capacity of gel ink pens. But we didn't focus on the development, so the gel ink was relied on importation. The Ministry of Science and Technology had allocated fund of 60 million RMB to help the pen manufacturer to develop gel ink at March 11th,2011.Based on the previous research of our group on carbon black gel ink, the development of red and blue gel ink was carried in this paper.Different color pastes were prepared by three kinds of red pigments suing sand mill at a constant solid content of 20%. Then the color paste was used to prepare red gel ink. The experimental result showed that the pigment fast red was the suitable red pigment for the red gel ink. The sanding process technology was optimized. The suitable condition is rotate speed of 2000rpm and sand milling time of 120min. The red gel ink was developed by optimization of the formula. The result showed that the best dosage of xanthan gum and color paste was 0.28% and 30% respectively. The performance of the red gel ink prepared in this paper is matchable to the Mikuni gel ink imported from Japan.Two different kinds of blue pigments, phthalocyanine blue B and phthalocyanine blue BGS, were used to prepare the blue paste. Phthalocyanine blue B was chosen for the blue gel ink according to the stability and the size distribution of the color paste. The dosage of dispersant A and dispersant B were optimized. The suitable weight ratio of dispersant A and dispersant B to pigment was 0.5 and 0.175 respectively. The appropriate milling time of the phthalocyanine blue B paste using dispersant A and dispersant B was 120min and 150min respectively. According to the observation of the color paste prepared by the two dispersants after reservation for six months, the dispersant B was much more suitable than dispersant A for the preparation of blue color paste. The performance of the blue gel ink prepared in this paper is matchable to blue gel ink of high quality collected from the market. And much more study on the dispersity of the blue gel ink should be further carried.