What are Optical Brightener, Titanium Dioxide and Bleaching Agent?

Many users have vague concepts about Optical Brightener, Titanium Dioxide and Bleaching Agent. They don't know the specific difference between them. Now Raytop Chemical will explain the difference between them in detail.

Definition：

Optical brightener is a kind of fluorescent dye, or white dye, and it is also a complex organic compound. Its characteristic is that it absorbs the invisible light emitted by ultraviolet rays and emits blue light, which offsets the yellow light in the substance, making the substance visible to the naked eye very white.

Titanium dioxide is an important inorganic chemical pigment and a very good white pigment. It also has the functions of reinforcing, anti-aging and filling. It is widely used in rubber products and plastic pipe profiles. It is mainly used for covering.

Bleaching agents are chemicals that can react colored molecules into colorless molecules through oxidation-reduction reactions to remove or lighten the color to achieve the function of bleaching objects. 

Principle of Brightening:

The function of the optical brightener is to convert the invisible ultraviolet radiation absorbed by the product into purple-blue fluorescent radiation, which complements the original yellow radiation to become white light, and improves the whiteness of the product under sunlight.

Titanium dioxide is generally used as the background color to whiten, and it can also cover some other color components to increase the whiteness.

Bleaching agent consumes oxygen in food through chemical action such as reduction, destroys and inhibits the activity of food oxidase and food color factors, makes food browning pigment fade or avoid browning, and also has a certain antiseptic effect 

Through the analysis, you should see that both optical brightener and titanium dioxide are physical whitening, and do not react with other raw materials, while bleaching agent achieves whitening through chemical reaction. There are some differences in the physical whitening of fluorescent brightening agent and titanium dioxide. Titanium dioxide is mainly for covering, and there may be problems such as uneven covering and insufficient covering strength. The optical brightener has the effect of light absorption and reflection to whiten, the whitening effect is more uniform, and the light fastness is high. Some manufacturers will put the fluorescent whitening agent and titanium dioxide together to use, the effect is much better.