About UV ink

UV ink is a kind of rapidly developing green ink. Compared with thermosetting and volatile drying inks, it has low-temperature rapid curing, does not contain volatile organic solvents, has less pollution, occupies a small area, has high efficiency, and has low energy consumption. Features. With the increase in the number of UV-curable raw materials and the sharp drop in price, the growth rate of UV ink usage and variety is surprising. The application field is also expanding, and UV special inks with various functions and varieties are emerging. For example, the use of UV materials without volatile solvents has led to the development of UV embossed inks, Braille inks, crystal inks, and marble inks; it has been developed using cured films with high cross-link density, heat resistance, and abrasion resistance. UV resistance soldering, UV character ink, etc.

The application of UV curing system in printing began in the United States. The main products are UV inks for lithographic printing and UV varnish. They are applied to multicolor offset printing presses. The resins used are acrylic oligomers. The printing system used a drying system with six high-power ultraviolet mercury lamps of 80 W/cm, and the curing time was a few seconds. Since then, the UV curing system has been widely used in offset printing, letterpress printing, and screen printing.

The application of ultraviolet curing system in China began in the mid-1980s. It was marked by the successful development of UV-curable inks. With the improvement of environmental awareness, UV printing showed a good momentum of growth in China.

At present, UV printing is mainly used for the packaging and printing of non-absorbent materials such as gold/silver cardboard, aluminized paper, and plastics. UV inks give prints high quality and high gloss, but also bring a lot of trouble to the operation.

(1) Since UV inks are highly corrosive, they require extremely high demands on the rubber rollers. EPDM or dual ink rollers are required. However, EPDM and Dual Ink Rollers are particularly sensitive to benzene ring-containing cleaners and can easily harden to change ink roller performance.
(2) The conversion time between ordinary ink printing and UV printing is too long, and the process is cumbersome. If the conversion and cleaning time is too long, the printer needs to be shut down for a long time, thereby affecting the production progress.
(3) UV ink ink balance tolerance is very narrow, easy to cause ink emulsification in the printing, affecting the stability of the printing quality, and improper control, there will be dirty version of the failure. Due to the high viscosity and lack of leveling properties after UV ink printing, the ink film surface may be rough and the hue may not be sufficiently transparent.
(4) Due to the poor superimposition performance of UV inks, it is necessary to add an intermediate seat for curing between the printing color groups in order to improve the overprinting effect; installing multiple sets of intermediate seats increases hardware investment.

At present, the domestic UV printing market is mainly concentrated in the field of packaging and printing. In the packaging printing, the color printing is more and the printing volume is larger, the problems such as longer conversion and cleaning time, difficult control of ink and ink balance, and high hardware investment are still negligible, but if these problems occur in commercial or publishing printing, etc. Markets based on short-run printing are absolutely unacceptable.

Reprinted from: Ke Yin Network