Cognis is a leading company in specialty chemicals. Utilizing its 160 years of experience in oleochemicals, Cognis develops innovative products for personal care, home care, and modern nutrition, as well as high-performance products for numerous industrial markets. The superior quality of Cognis natural sourced products is the key to their success. They spent great effort to maintain this quality, from careful selection of raw materials to state-of-the-art process technology.
The color of the fatty alcohols is a major quality criteria. In the past, samples for analysis were taken from the process stream and measured in the lab. To reduce this time consuming and
cost-intensive procedure the plant applied an inline spectrometer system. The color is determined as Lovibond number. The flow through cells with a path length of 50mm are connected with the instrument via fiber optics. The sample temperature is 60°C. To eliminate the effect of soiled windows an offset correction is done before colorimetric data evaluation. For process communication the Profibus DP protocol is used.