A Technical Trend of Flexo Ink

Abstract

In the technology of flexo printing, some innovations in the field of a flexo printing machine, a flexo plate, or an anilox roll have been continued in several years. By these innovations, flexo printing has come to have a quality almost equivalent to gravure printing or offset printing, and flexo printing has brought a possibility of replacing gravure printing and offset printing. These innovations also required innovations from flexo inks. This paper describes the latest technology trends of flexo ink
1.Rise of ink color density
High brilliance and high definition flexo printing use an anilox roll with the greater number of lines.(High brilliance and high minute flexo printing use high line number anilox rolls.)The volume of a cell becomes smaller as the line number of an anilox roll becomes higher. In this case, a development is needed in flexo ink with the performance of high color density and low viscosity.
2. Water based flexo ink
Water based ink is used for the purpose of an environmental improvement. Ink physical properties and printing properties have been improved as a result of eager research, as the result printing properties are approaching the printing properties of solvent type ink, however there are also still many subjects. Recently, a company who had introduced a printing machine specially designed for water-based flexo to plastic films came out.
3.UV cured flexo ink
By development of a new photo polymerization initiator and various new technologies, the problem of the bad smell of printed matter has been solved gradually. Although a close-up of cationic curable flexo ink has been taken from a viewpoint of a bad smell again, since it has various restrictions, cationic ink has not resulted in spread yet. As an improvement measure of a bad smell, the motion that proposes EB curable flexo ink system has also come out.