Investigate the composition, color, material, and choice of ink
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Printing is defined as the industrial reproduction process of transferring ink to the surface of a substrate through various pressures. The traditional printing uses the printing plate as the intermediate carrier of the graphic and text, so that the graphic area and the blank area are separated by various means, and then The ink is transferred to the surface of the product. Digital printing throws the printing plate aside and directly transfers the graphic in the computer to the surface of the product. The evolution of technology is moving in the most rapid direction, but it seems that printing does not show signs of abandoning the ink.
Composition of ink
Content is the most fundamental purpose of printing, but to deliver content, color plays a very important role. There are many things that can express color in nature. Ink experts first think of pigments and dyes with long shelf life and bright colors.
Pigments are also good dyes and cannot be printed directly on the surface of the product. The reason why pigments and dyes can be firmly attached to the surface of the product should be attributed to the resin. Most of the resin is solid, and most of the resin in the ink is not a simple resin but a mixture formed by dissolving in a solvent.
The ink is composed of a pigment, a resin, and a solvent, and all of the printing inks do not contain the above three components.
Pad printing ink and screen printing ink
Different printing processes do not have the same requirements for inks. It is also necessary to add appropriate supplemental ingredients to the inks to make them easier to use in specific situations. For example, offset inks have higher viscosity and good water resistance, and gravure inks are relatively thin. , good fluidity; screen printing inks must have good permeability.
The main difference between the inks used in different printing processes is that the additives contained in the ink are different. This article will mainly talk about screen printing inks and pad printing inks.
In terms of substrate suitability, screen printing has great advantages, especially in the non-shaped plastic hardware electronics and direct consumer goods industry, screen printing has gained wide acclaim. However, there is no universal printing method in the world, and screen printing is no exception. In the field of industrial printing of small areas and irregular substrates, screen printing has encountered real troubles, which has led to the birth of pad printing technology. It can be said that although the pad printing technology and screen printing are very different, the industrial fields they are involved in are very similar.
The earliest pad printing inks were replaced by screen printing inks, and there was no absolute discomfort in practice. However, the ink is used in different printing environments, and there must be differences in adaptability, such as pad printing ink, the user does not require it to have the permeability of the screen printing ink, but it is required to have better thixotropy and dryness. To ensure that the transfer process from steel plate to plastic head and substrate is more accurate. The use of special pad printing inks will undoubtedly make it easier to improve print quality.
MARABU pioneered the development of dedicated pad printing inks. The surface tension of the ink is maintained within a constant range by the action of the additive to maintain an absolutely consistent ink transfer during the printing process.
The process of ink transfer and the nature of the pad printing head are also closely linked. The surface tension of the pad printing head is controlled within a range close to that of the pad printing ink. This seems to be a systematic project, and the essential purpose is to improve the ink transfer efficiency. The Japanese have solved this problem from another angle. They installed a plastic head cleaning device on the pad printing machine. However, the addition of the plastic head cleaning device mainly controls the amount of ink transferred, and the transfer efficiency is not improved.
MARABU has 6 (actually 8) pad printing inks to choose from: GL, mainly used on metal, ceramic, glass surface, basically a two-component ink, need to add GLH hardener, TPR, is in SR A series of screen printing inks based on improved pad printing inks, where SR can make materials can make TPR in the pad printing process; the same reason, TPY is an improved pad printing ink based on PY series screen printing inks. TPU inks are available for surfaces that are very difficult to print; TPT is a pad printing ink that is primarily used on oil pad printers: TPL is more stable and maintains good uniformity over long periods of friction. Two more are TPP and TPS.
It is worth noting that screen printing inks and pad printing inks are completely versatile, but only need to add additives to change the printability. Therefore, when there is no special pad printing ink, it can be replaced by screen printing ink.
Ink color: primary color, spot color, standard color
The color of nature is colorful. It is impossible to express it all with ink. There are two ways to copy colors in printing: one is to directly match the spot color for printing, and the other is to print through four colors.
The four colors are based on the four color material superposition principles in the CMYK color model. In general, the four-color copying technology can basically restore the color we require. The layered originals usually use four-color copying technology.
The replication advantage of four-color inks lies in the layered manuscript. For most advertising designs and creatives as well as industrial printing, the use of spot colors is a very common phenomenon. Spot colors are more representative of the designer's ideas and easier to prevent infringement. In theory, spot colors can also be matched with the original color, but that is not only difficult to match the hue, but also the possibility of wasting ink. Therefore, the reproduction of printing technology color includes two-way copying technology, one is that it tends to use four-color ink to copy colors, mainly used in the case where the original is layered, and there is a superposition of color and color. Primary color printing is the most difficult technology to master in printing technology due to the complex principles of color science and dot synthesis. How to control the change of dots from the original to the film, plate and substrate is the core of the primary color printing technology.
Spot colors are used when the colors do not overlap each other. Because of the unusually rich pigments in nature, there are many types of spot inks. In the general sense, the spot color refers to all colors except the primary color, and the meaning of the spot color is infinite. The United States PANTONE company to develop ink color standard color, and according to the production of spot color ink printing, the color card commonly used today.
The PANTONE color card is actually a very small part of the spot color, which we call the standard color. Now that Europe has developed European standard colors, we can treat these two standard colors as a subset of all spot colors. Of course, the standard colors of various color card printing can also be equipped with a lot of spot colors. The color card is the common language of the company engaged in printing business in the world.
What kind of red is red, no one can tell, but if you tell the PANTONE color card number, you will find it easily. Whether the ink manufacturer can provide the ink according to the standard color card is of great interest to the user. Choosing the ink color is an important content. Although the four-color printing technology is difficult to master, it seems very simple to select the primary color ink because the ink manufacturer produces There is only one set of four-color inks. In contrast, the choice of spot inks is much more troublesome. If the designer just uses some standard color to express his design ideas, and you just purchased the ink, then you can only use this ink. However, fewer and fewer designers will do this, and the boss may not allow him to do so, because the easier it is to get, the counterfeiting is simple. The blending ink is also based on the subtractive method in color science, but it is as important as theory and experience to quickly match the exact color.
Material and ink selection
Printing methods such as offset printing may not be so troublesome, because the printing of paper is very good, and there is no need to consider the adhesion problem. However, screen printing and pad printing are not so simple. There are many printing materials for silk screen printing and pad printing. An ink replacement, ink manufacturers must produce a wide variety of inks in order to fully adapt to the market.
We can simply divide the printing materials into the following categories:
1. PP and PE, in the plastic family, PP, PE are two kinds of materials with very large amounts. First of all, they have good physical properties and good chemical resistance. Most solvents can't do them, so in the coating Widely used in cosmetics, plastic film and electrical products. But this is also why they are difficult to print because their constituent molecules are non-polar molecules. At present, the two methods of printing generally use prepress processing methods, and the more common methods are flame treatment and high frequency processing. The Pl treated water produced by MARABU is actually a strong oxidant, which forms a rough surface layer on the surface of the oxidized material to achieve good adhesion of the ink. The development of process-free PP inks is also the goal of many manufacturers, and the technology is basically mature, but the process-free inks are not well attached to the PE surface. MARBU's PP series inks are process-free inks.
In combination with prepress processing, there are many types of inks that can be used on PP and PE surfaces. We are talking about solvent inks. For UV inks, prepress processing is also a must. There are currently no UV inks that are not treated. It should be said that in the current printing technology field, it is difficult to print on PP and PE materials to achieve stable quality control.
2. Some polar materials such as ABS, PC, PVC, PS, AS are easy to print. Most of these materials can be printed without prepress processing. This part of the ink is the strength of all manufacturers.
3. Glass, metal, ceramics and other substrates, the surface does not have any absorption properties, inks made according to conventional methods are difficult to work, and in most cases two-component inks are used.
Nowadays, more and more companies are engaged in the printing and printing of silk screens. The ability to find inks suitable for customers' products means the ability to obtain orders. However, the supplier's data shows that it can be suitable for this kind of material. To determine whether it can really meet the requirements, the key is to test according to the requirements. If the test results are not good, you may want to change the ink. Sometimes you may get the wrong information and technology, so be sure to understand the test method, many inks can not achieve the printing method of the product, the wrong test method is an important reason for this result. If some problems cannot be solved, you should contact the ink manufacturer in time.
The important information provided in the previous paragraph is that we must first understand what the customer's product is, and secondly, be familiar with the choice of ink, and then carefully test until the customer is satisfied. In theory, there are no products that can't be printed. In fact, many products are troubled by printing. The key is whether there are enough experimental methods to solve them.