Depth Guide For Indicating Silica Gel Orange vs. Silica Gel Blue
Monday, Mar 09, 2020
Silica gel is a widely utilized and highly popular desiccant used in a variety of industrial and daily life applications. Featured with small-sized pores, silica gel allows moisture or water vapors or impurities to peep through it leaving behind pure substances. Among its other counterparts, Silica gel has gained popularity due to its larger surface area thus encouraging faster and efficient moisture adsorption and saturation indicating property. In this article, we will discuss the indicating property of silica gel and its two types.
Indicating silica gel have this innate ability to notify the saturation level by the color transition. There are basically two types of indicating silica gel: Silica gel orange and Silica gel blue.
This color-changing silica gel is made of alumino-silicate. They are eco-friendly and are used in various applications involving the prevention of moisture damage in goods and other stuff. Silica gel orange indicators are heavy metal-free, non-toxic and affordable.
When dry it has its industry-made orange color, but as it gets saturated the color of the silica gel gradually changes to green color. This happens due to the presence of methyl violet. The indicating property becomes a great way of notifying when one needs to replace or regenerate the desiccants for the maintenance of constant operation.
There are silica gels that turn from orange to colorless upon saturation. Orange to green silica gel is available in the form of hard round or spherically shaped beads.
Just as Silica gel orange supports visual moisture control, silica gel blue too supports the same. The only difference stands are in its color change. When moisture-free, this desiccant displays the color blue. Upon trapping moisture, at first it turns into light blue color.
As the moisture content raises and reaches a saturation level, this blue colored silica gel turns into pink. Now, it indicates that its time for the regeneration process. The color transition happens due to the chemical compound called cobalt chloride, a heavy metal salt. The indicating property is imbibed in these desiccants by washing them with a concentration of cobalt salt.
Silica gel blue is banned in some European countries due to its toxicity. They are available in the market in the form of beads and crystals.
Be it orange to green silica gel or blue to pink silica gel, both are equally great performers and used widely in numerous applications such as transformer breathers, air dryers, goods packaging, electronic packaging, pharmaceutical packaging, diagnostic kits packaging, etc.
