Does Industrial Polyester Yarn Come in Custom Colors?

In one of our previous blog titled, “What Raw Materials are used to make Industrial Polyester Yarn” we featured a section on color masterbatches. Customers often ask if it is possible to purchase polyester yarn in a specific color that they need for a certain project. The quite simple answer to that question is “yes”. It is possible to produce industrial polyester yarns in a wide range of colors from deep and vibrant shades to neon shades to pastels.

Most industrial polyester yarn manufacturers offer a range of standard colors. This may be anything from 10 to 20 colors, including black and shades of gray, that they produce regularly. These colors could also be available in different deniers. The different deniers are offered to best fit the customer process and final product.

Although the standard range of colors may appear limited to between 10 and 20, the actual range of colors the manufacturer could offer is much larger. Over the years the manufacturer may have produced 50 or 60 distinct colors. Many of these colors may only have been produced once for a specific customer but once a color is made and the formulation saved, then that color can always be made again. In theory, the number of colors that could be offered is endless.

Colored industrial polyester yarns are made by adding a “color masterbatch” into the extrusion process at a pre-determined rate. This addition rate will produce the color that the customer needs when the yarn is wound onto cardboard tubes at the last stage of the production process.

Over the years, companies have developed the “art” of color matching. I recall from my early days in Textiles working in a polypropylene yarn production facility in the UK that it would take multiple attempts to match a color that a customer needed. The customer would send in a sample, which could be anything from a piece of fabric, a piece of plastic, a paint sample, etc., and ask for a yarn that matched the sample color as closely as possible.

Using an understanding of how different pigments could be mixed to produce a specific shade, the person responsible for matching the color would optimize their recipe until a good match was obtained. Depending on the person’s skill and experience, the number of attempts to produce a good game could vary significantly.

In the mid-1990s, spectrophotometers began to be used. This equipment was able to measure the color of any object and report the color as a series of numbers using CIELAB color space L*a*b. “L” is a measure of lightness/darkness of the color, with black at 0 and white at 100. “a” is the green–red axis, and “b” is the blue–yellow axis. 

Loaded into the spectrophotometer software would be a database created using all the pigments available to the person matching the color. Using this database, a recipe could be suggested that would give a blend of the different pigments that, in theory, should produce a color that was a good match to the sample that the customer had provided and had been measured and reported using L*a*b color space.

Once this initial yarn sample was produced, it could also be measured on the spectrophotometer to get its L*a*b color space numbers, which would be compared to the data of the sample object the customer provided. The difference between the two colors would be reported as the Delta E. Modifications to the recipe could be made until a match that satisfied the customer was obtained.

This is the basis of the process used today to provide custom color matches for customers. The color masterbatch manufacturer will use the technology available to them to produce the masterbatch that the yarn manufacturer will add to their extrusion process.

The consistency of the color master batch and the extrusion process is crucial to producing colors time after time, year after year, which do not have color differences detectable by the human eye. This means the color difference is 1.5 Delta E or less from production to production run.