Wrong Choice of Defoamer Leads to Endless Troubles

Many clients face a wide variety of products when choosing defoamers, which can be overwhelming. After simple testing, they may select the wrong defoamer, resulting in significant impacts on production and operations. The consequences of this are summarized below:

After choosing the wrong defoamer and adding it to the product, the foam is eliminated, but it makes the product cloudy and loses its original color. This can seriously affect the product's appearance, ultimately leading to difficulty in sales and becoming a problematic product. Industries where this situation is more likely to occur include: metal cutting fluids.

The addition of defoamers to products can affect product specifications, leading to failures in product testing. Although defoamers are used in small amounts, some of their components may react chemically with the original product components once added, potentially forming other substances that can impact product specifications, ultimately resulting in failed tests. Industries where this situation is more likely to occur include the coatings industry.

This situation is quite common. After searching for new suppliers and choosing a new defoamer, the unit price indeed appears to have decreased significantly. However, due to issues such as product concentration, the required dosage has increased, even becoming 2 to 4 times that of the previous amount. As a result, after a year, it was found that production costs have actually increased. While the unit price of the defoamer has dropped, the effective content has also decreased, so to achieve the same effect, the dosage must be increased.

Once, a customer chose a cheaper solid defoamer in pursuit of a lower price. However, the low-cost defoamer used waste stone ash as its carrier, making it difficult to dissolve in the product system, which ultimately led to pipeline blockages in the machinery. This resulted in damage to the advanced imported equipment and incurred significant costs in terms of human resources, materials, and finances for repairs. In contrast, a high-quality solid defoamer, although more expensive, has a better dissolvability of its carrier, does not produce residues or precipitates, and does not affect production equipment, while also exhibiting excellent foam suppression performance.

These are a series of adverse consequences resulting from the wrong choice of defoamer. Of course, there are many more, which will not be listed one by one. In summary, choosing the appropriate defoamer is very important and requires careful consideration.