Technical
| Subject | Images |
|---|---|
March 23, 2018 | Finn Hinze
Any man-made synthetic material contains long homogeneous molecule chains that form a strong and uniform product. These chains join other long chains, leaving only a few open chain ends, and therefore only a small number of surface bonding points, and this is where the problem of low adhesion and what is known as ‘wettability’ occurs. Wettability is the ratio between the surface energies of the liquid ink and the solid substrate. In general, a material can be wetted if its surface energy, measured in dyne/cm, is greater than the surface energy of the liquid. If it’s the other way around, there will be adhesion problems.
March 9, 2018 | ToyoInk Co., Ltd.
Toyo Ink research labs in Japan solved the technical challenge of non-evaporative wet trapping in flexo with the development of an EB-curable ink system for CI flexo printing: The Elex-one™ FL series. Since other contemporary, conventional EB flexo inks contain a small percentage of volatiles (solvents and water), a small trace of such ink components may evaporate during printing. This necessitates the continuous addition of lost components to retain print quality and often leads to discrepancies in ink stability and quality during printing. Elex-one is a completely non-volatile ink so there is no concern for the evaporation of volatile materials...
