RawSource

You have a synthesis route that calls for a specific chloro- or fluoro-substituted aromatic, the lab sample came from one source, and now you need it at pilot and then production scale with a Certificate of Analysis you can trust. Sourcing fine-chemical intermediates is rarely about the spot price; it is about getting the exact isomer, at the purity your route needs, in the q...

A polyolefin part that chalks and cracks after one summer outdoors. An automotive coating that loses gloss and fades on the hood first. An agricultural film that fails halfway through the season where the sulfur spray landed. These are photo-oxidation failures, and the additive that prevents them — at low loading, by interrupting the degradation chain rather than absorbing li...

A cable jacket that has to pass a vertical burn test. A flexible foam that a furniture flammability standard will not let through. An engineering plastic that needs a fire rating without the chlorine its OEM customer has banned. Every one of these is a flame-retardant problem, and solving it comes down to matching the right additive chemistry to the polymer, the process tempe...

A flexible foam that collapses before it sets. A rigid panel with a soft, under-cured core. A molded part that demolds too slowly to hit cycle time. A car-seat foam that fails a fogging test. Every one of these is a catalyst-balance problem — because in polyurethane the catalyst package, more than almost anything else, controls how the two competing reactions race each other....

Pick the wrong epoxy hardener and the symptoms are immediate: a pot life too short to wet out the part, a coating that ambers in sunlight, a casting that cracks from exotherm, or a laminate whose heat resistance falls short on the data sheet. The curing agent — not the epoxy resin — decides most of those outcomes. Choosing it well starts with knowing the classes and what each...