Technical

Subject	Images

Tension Control – The Types of Motor and Brakes

September 8, 2020 | Daywey Chen

Web tension control is one of the most important factors affecting the quality of the print. In Flexographic printing web tension is divided into three zones: unwind (infeed), Printing (Intermediate), and rewind (outfeed). To keep substrates at specific tension in each zone, tension drives are used. The two common tension drive is motor and brakes (clutches).

The three main families of PE films

August 13, 2020 | Daywey Chen

Polyethylene (PE) is one of the most common films used in today’s market. There are three main families of the PE films, which are LDPE (low-density PE), LLDPE (linear low-density PE), and HDPE (high-density PE). LDPE is best in clarity, most resistant to tear, and has the lowest stiffness. LLDPE has higher stiffness when compared to LDPE and is somewhat resistant to tear and has the greatest potential for downgauging. HDPE has the highest stiffness, but it is less resistant to tear and has the highest tensile strength. HDPE is the best barrier material of the three.

NIR drying system increase printing speed by 60%

August 5, 2020 | Inkjet Insight LLC

A test study was conducted by adphos, an NIR drying solution provider. To replace an IR + hot air drying with aNIR® (advanced Near InfraRed) resulted in an 60% in print speed from 500fpm to 800fpm for high coverage sample job.

Process Printing – Creating the color gamut from the subtractive model

July 22, 2020 | Daywey Chen

Process printing is the reproduction of the color gamut through a few ink colors. In flexography, the common process color used are Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key or black. It is commonly abbreviated as CMYK. The four colors are printed onto the substrate as dots with varying size, shape and spacing. The four layers of CMYK dots are combined to form an optical illusion that these tiny dots are blended into smooth tones by the human eye. This process is known as the halftone process. The CMYK process printing is a subtractive model...

How to communicate in color?

July 8, 2020 | Daywey Chen

Communication has enabled society to advance. To be able to commutate effectively and efficiently has separated humans from all other species on the planet. People commutate in text, in sound, in code, in pictures…etc. People commute in many different languages, English, Chinese, Spanish, Malaysian…etc., you name it. As a printing professional, how do we communicate in color? What is the common color language that enables us to be on the same page?

Drying V.S Curing

June 17, 2020 | Daywey Chen

Drying process applies or generates heat to evaporate the water or solvents in the ink, leaving the pigment behind on the substrate to provide color. The curing process is the process to solidify the ink from liquid to solid...

The IR Drying Unit

June 9, 2020 | Daywey Chen

Drying is one of the most important factors in printing. You can print with great registration. You can print with great speed. At the end of the day, if the ink doesn’t dry, your end result wouldn’t come out good. There are many drying methodologies. In this article, we are going to explore one of the drying technologies, Infrared.

100% eco-friendly algae-based ink

May 26, 2020 | Daywey Chen

The definition of a 100% eco-friendly ink is that it can go down the sink without causing any environmental harm. When we mention eco-friendly inks or biodegradable ink such as vegetable ink, soy ink or water-based ink. The term vegetable, soy, and water make it sounds like you can safely dump the ink waste down the drain. Some may even think that it could be safely consumed. However, this is not the case. These, vegetable, soy and water-based ink are not 100% eco-friendly...

Different Plate Making Process Discussed Inside Out

May 12, 2020 | Sinwa Printech Group

As the society lean towards more environmentally friendly production solutions. The plate making industry searches for a greener plate making process. Let’s compare some of the plate making processes.

Looking into the Packaging Material Characteristics

April 7, 2020 | Daywey Chen

One of the main purposes of packaging is to communicate with the customer about the product. However, that’s not all, packaging serves great importance when it comes to functionality. By functionality, we mean the ability to keep the product away from external contamination, damages, humidity, temperature and light. To keep the product inside of the packaging from leaking out, for instance to keep the odor, liquid inside of the packaging. Often times, multiple layers of materials are laminated together to achieve the functionality required, as different packaging materials have different properties. Today we are going look into a few common packaging materials used on the market and their properties.

Do you have control over your ink viscosity?

February 25, 2020 | Daywey Chen

How important is it to have control over your ink viscosity? Ink viscosity affects how well your ink is able to transfer over from the anilox to the plate, and from the plate onto the printing substrate. It affects how well your ink will dry on the substrate. In general, your press production speed, and the quality of your print is highly correlated to the ink viscosity. In Flexographic, having a suitable ink viscosity makes all the difference.

Having control over your ink viscosity can easily get you USD77,568 of savings per year...see our calculation

How Temperature & Humidity Can Make a Difference in Your Print Room?

December 11, 2019 | Zack Chen

The working temperature & humidity has a great impact on print quality. Temperature & humidity will mainly affect the ink and the substrate characteristic under operation. First, let's look at the ink.

Technical

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