The Challenges

Beautiful and upscale design is deemed crucial for developing everyday items. Home appliance products such as vacuum cleaners, refrigerators and washing machines increasingly push for refined design, not only for functional purposes but also for enhancing their role as interior items. As the competition for sophisticated design is intensifying, painting -- a key procedure for creating a variety of textures and colors based on diverse technologies-- has become the essential production process. Recently, customers called for the development of fresh materials that could meet production efficiency, optimal economic effect and eco-friendly concepts. LOTTE Chemical has continued to research and develop non-painting metallic-feel resins by working on leading technologies, innovative processes and reliability tests. The company finally overcame technical defects such as flow-mark and weld-line, and pulled off a breakthrough. The result is starex® Luminous, an eco- friendly solution with optimal design.

The Solutions

After countless trials and errors, LOTTE Chemical optimized base resin and combined a variety of metal particles, overcoming the technical limitations that generate flow mark and weld line. The company checked and prevented possible problems through CAE and provided design guide and technical solutions such as steam injection and hole cutting techniques.

The product allows for anti-scratch and balanced material property balance, as well as excellent appearance including high luminance/high chroma. Putting together the excellent features, LOTTE Chemical proposed total solutions to a customer’s newly developed cleaner model.

starex® Luminous, a premium-level non-painting resin, allows for excellent effects such as brightness and gloss on its own material properties. As a new production process is utilized, the material also supports diverse colors, depths and metallic feel, expanding the scope of engineering plastics applications. Besides, compared with painting-based materials, starex® Luminous offers much simpler production process and lower defect rate, helping customers enhance production efficiency and secure optimal economic effect. Its non-paining and recyclable features also come

with eco-friendly marketing benefits.

starex® Luminous has visually sophisticated design, functional strength as housing material and production advantage, showcasing LOTTE Chemical’s innovation efforts for customer products and offering a clue about the next-generation home appliance material development.

Key Features

• Good Surface Quality & Paintability

• Scratch Resistance (‘F’ ↑) 

• Eco-Friendly Production Process without Solvent 

• Sparkling / Pearly / Metallic-Look Exterior Effects for Various Applications 

Customer Benefits

• Upscale Design by Metallic Texture and Various Colors - Lower Flow-mark & Weld-line Defects 

• Reduction of Production Costs by Simplified Production Process 

     - Omission of painting costs, recycle of defect products and lower defect rate compared with painting-based materials 

• Eco-Friendly Marketing Possible : Non-painting, Recycle 

Chanram Hong │  Application Development Manager 

chanram.hong@lottechem.com

T +82-51-465-6829

For more inquires, please contact.

※ The content above is information regarding a case that has been applied to a certain customer. It does not make any explicit or implicit guarantee or warranty regarding the safety or utility of the service. Furthermore, the content of this document is not legally binding and suitability issues regarding final use must be determined by the user, and the user alone is responsible for the outcome. The values and information specified in this document may change without prior notice for quality enhancement of the product. LCC-C-122019