Covestro has introduced a new digital sampling solution to speed up the process from design to series production so that customers can realistically visualize product designs at an early stage of development and structure them in terms of surface.

ʺOur strategy is to get in touch with our customers at an early stage of product design, when the first material specifications are being defined, ʺ explains Dr. Tobias Rausch, Business Development Digital Sampling in the Engineering Plastics business unit at Covestro and head of the project. ʺWe also want to facilitate collaboration between cross-site teams with new digital tools such as catalogs and material twins.ʺ

Customers' product development requirements are constantly growing: they want to be flexible in their choice of materials and increasingly value a more sustainable origin. At the same time, they want to bring their products to market faster while increasing efficiency and saving costs. In addition, they often work in several teams across regions, which need to communicate effectively with each other and also exchange sample parts.

The optimal solution for these requirements is to involve Covestro and its Imagio® CQ program at an early stage. This enables customers to make a material decision more quickly and generate and visually evaluate sample parts in the early stages of development. This saves time and costs during specification, and the suitability of more sustainable plastics can also be tested at an early stage. In the three-dimensional space of color, material and finish (CMF), the possibilities are almost unlimited.

The backbone of the digital solution is X-Rite/Pantone's Total Appearance Capture (TAC) technology, which captures optical properties such as color, gloss, transparency, translucency or texture of a specific material sample using an optical appearance measurement device. The data is stored in a special data format.

This is supported by leading rendering software tools that Covestro customers use for their design and marketing visualization. Covestro's Color & Design Centers (CDCs) in Filago, Italy, Newark, USA, and the Caojing and Guangzhou facilities in China are already equipped with the technology to create digital twins of materials.