Four major green ink applications

The domestic economy depends on industrial development. The development trend of the printing industry is the simplification of printing, high efficiency, high quality, and low cost; the printing materials are environmentally friendly; the printed matter is more timely and exquisite. Correspondingly, inks are also required to develop toward environmental protection with high quality, versatility, adaptability, full category, and non-toxic tastelessness. The single-fluid offset inks, water-based offset printing inks, and water-based flexo printing inks that have been developed abroad are ink types that meet the development trend of green inks.

1、Single-fluid offset printing ink The ink is printed with water and dampening device removed, no waste water is generated, no need to coordinate ink and water balance. Unlike waterless offset printing, the use of single-fluid offset printing inks does not require special plates or printing presses. The ink can be printed on a sheet of paper glue, or it can be printed on a four-color offset press with a thermosetting web, which also increases the speed of the offset press. The use of this ink is very simple, as long as the ink directly in the fountain, you can open. In the process of printing, a much smaller number of sheets than traditional offset printing can be used to meet the requirements of the field density, thus greatly reducing the amount of waste paper. The dot gain of the ink is very small, and dot duplication is particularly accurate. Dots can still be seen within 95% of the dots. The quality of printed images is clear, and the accuracy of color density can reach a good level. In today's ever-changing era of technology, companies must create new products that meet their customers' needs in order to survive the competition. The printing ink industry is no exception, and some of these big companies are constantly reforming their own products and developing products that can bring more benefits to customers. Bill Tasker, Principal of National Printing Ink Research Institute (NPIRI) and Vice President of INX International, said: “In the past, people generally thought that ink technology developed with the development of printing, but with the The progress of ink jet technology has to incorporate newer content in ink technology, and the development of ink technology is very fast.” US market share of printing ink products: offset printing $2.2 billion flexo printing $900 million gravure printing $600 million screen Printing 260 million USD Digital Printing/Inkjet Printing 250 million USD Lead Printing 100 million USD Special Inks (Safety, Marking) 270 million USD Total 4.580 billion USD Existing products often have some improvements, for which some large printing ink manufacturers established a fund. Yes, promised to provide new technology to make inks have better printing performance. Last year was a breakthrough year. Many new technologies emerged at the Drupa conference. Drupa has the ability to gather the research results of various companies.

2. Hybrid inks Hybrid inks combine the characteristics of UV inks and common inks and are another area of ​​development that many companies are researching. Companies such as Sun Chemical, Flint Ink, Superior Printing Ink, INX Braden Sutphin, and Environmental Inks and Coatings are all working on this area. Harvey Brice, Manager of Superior Printing Ink and a member of the GATF Steering Committee, said: “The production of a UV hybrid ink makes sense for the printing industry. It can be used on the press without replacing the blanket or ink roller. The desk press is set for UV inks and can also run regular inks. This is a great improvement for the printer because of its great flexibility." Hybrid UV inks allow the printer to simply With minor adjustments, all production operations for a job can be completed online. The production efficiency is really improved, and the ink's own transferability and printing quality are also higher than those of conventional UV inks. The biggest advantage of the HyBrite ink system manufactured by Sun Chemical Company is that it can perform in-line UV coating without lengthening the transfer process to complete the water-based coating. These improvements come mainly from the additional conditions of UV curing, and the price will therefore increase, but researchers predict that the final productivity will increase. They expect that the hybrid technology will continue to improve, improve product quality and reduce printing costs. Single-fluid inks and hybrid inks are two improvements that are currently being discussed, but some larger ink companies are working on other products. Energy-curable inks are a fast growing area in the ink industry, especially electron beam (EB) technology, which will occupy a place in the future market.

Water-based offset inks Water-based inks have long been used in water-based gloss, water-based flexo inks, and gravure water-based inks, but the application of water-based inks to water-based offset inks is an important new product. . Water-based offset inks are water-based inks containing acrylate linkages. They contain no mineral oil and no volatile organic solvents. They are dried by water evaporation and the conjunctiva of the binder components. The drying speed is equivalent to that of waterborne varnish. It is purely physically dry and does not require special drying equipment, but infrared dryers can be used to speed up drying. Water-based offset printing inks are suitable for printing on all conventional offset printing presses, such as four-color printing with the fastest printing on a conventional four-color offset printing press, without smudging, and excellent print quality. Water-based offset printing inks are particularly suitable for small-size sheetfed offset and short-run imprints. The printing industry is one of the fastest technologically advanced industries in the world in the past 20 years and has entered a new era of digital printing. According to briefings, humans have gone through about 100,000 years of printing from languages ​​to printing, 450 years from the invention of printing to printing, and from about 30 years from lead printing to color desktop systems, from color desktop systems to multimedia electronic publications ( Paperless printing lasted for 3 years and it took only 18 months from multimedia to the Internet. The international development trend is that the high-end color prints are rapidly growing, and high technologies such as computers and electronics are widely used in the printing process. At present, the situation of China's printing industry is: traditional offset printing still dominates, flexographic printing, screen printing has developed rapidly, post-press binding automation, color desktop publishing system has been widely used, open and digital graphics processing system has been As a basic feature of the prepress system, direct plate making technology and digital printing have become the development direction of the printing and publishing industry. The development of the printing industry and the continuous improvement of environmental protection regulations have brought tremendous challenges and opportunities to the development of the printing industry, including the development of various new types of printing consumables that are in line with environmental protection; the transformation of the original processes, including the improvement of raw materials Improvements in drying methods, etc. At present, solvent inks, which are widely used in screen printing and gravure printing processes in China, contain 50% to 60% of volatile components. If a diluent is used to adjust the viscosity of the ink, when the print is dry, The total content of volatile components emitted by the ink is 70%-80%. The gas volatilized by these organic solvents enters the workers' body through breathing, causing damage to the human liver and nervous system, and causing great harm to the environment. The alcohol fountain solution in the offset printing process discharges organic volatiles to the air in the workshop all the time. When the ink roller and the blanket are temporarily cleaned when they are temporarily stopped or replaced, the flammable and explosive gasoline is used in large quantities ( Of course, from the point of view of the manufacturer, using gasoline as a cleaning agent is not only convenient and readily available, but also has a good cleaning effect and a fast drying speed. The most important thing is that the price is cheap and the production cost is greatly reduced. However, when seeing the benefits of gasoline, people often forget that using gasoline in this way could potentially cause an explosion that could make the printing plant empty for a moment; on the other hand, when using leaded gasoline, it will lead to The chronic lead poisoning of printing workers is even more neglected. For a long time, the "ink flying" phenomenon in various printing processes has plagued the entire printing process. This is because when the printing press rotates at a high speed, the ink film between the ink rollers is split and elongated, resulting in a broken piece. Under the effect of the surface tension of the ink, these pieces shrink and form a large number of spherical small ink droplets scattered in the air. The so-called flying ink phenomenon. The problem of flying ink is not only a common type of printing failure that is extremely hazardous in the high-speed printing process, but also a type of problem that causes serious environmental pollution.

4, water-based flexo printing In the future, newspaper printing will develop from water-based offset to water-based flexo. The offset printing machine has a complex structure and is expensive, but the structure and working process of the flexo printing press are simpler, with less waste paper, low energy consumption, low ink fog, no reduction in ink color of the printing ink, no staining, no solvent during the printing process. Participation with oil does not emit odors and reduce environmental pollution. A new type of water-based (anionic) flexo ink can be used to print newspapers of good quality. With this type of water-based ink-printed newspaper, the ink can be removed using a conventional flotation papermaking method for recycled papermaking, and then utilized as white papermaking. In addition to the above-mentioned several types of inks, with the advent of a variety of binders, solvents, colorants, and applications in ink technology, some foreign companies have developed a pure vegetable oil (completely containing no mineral oil) of the connection material manufacturing. Sheetfed offset inks, series of non-pigmented inks, etc.