Ink Industry Status and Development Trends (1)

With the advent of the electronic age and the information age, the rapid development of high and new technology, and the continuous improvement of printing technology and printing technology have brought boundless vitality to the development of the ink industry. In recent years, from the type of ink to the quality; from the adaptation of the printing speed to the demand for exquisite products; from the requirements of special anti-counterfeiting to the social environmental protection, all have been rapidly developed.

First, the status of the ink industry

The development of printing technology has led to an increase in the number of inks, and the quality of ink has been greatly improved.

Ink products are divided into lithographic inks, letterpress inks, gravure inks, and stencil inks according to the printing plate type. Lithographic inks include general offset inks, waterless offset inks, and offset iron inks. Letterpress inks include copper-printed inks and flexographic inks, which are now dominated by flexographic inks. Gravure inks mainly consist of thick and short engraved gravure inks and very gravure gravure inks. Stencil inks include screen printing inks and inks.

According to the printing materials, there are paper inks, textile printing inks, plastic film inks, glass inks, and ceramic applique inks.

According to the ink binders, there are mainly oxidative polymerization drying resin inks, volatile dry solvent inks and water inks, and UV inks.

Anti-counterfeiting and functional inks include photosensitive inks, thermal inks, pressure-sensitive inks, foaming inks, fragrance inks, conductive inks, magnetic inks, liquid crystal inks, jet inks, and microcapsule structure inks.

The above printing inks have been produced and applied in China. Among them, the most widely used ones are the offset inks, flexographic inks, gravure inks, screen printing inks, and security inks.

1. Offset printing ink

There are water offset printing plates whose graphic parts and non-graphic parts are almost on the same plane. It is the use of the physical phenomena of oil and water incompatibility, which makes the graphic part of the oil and water resistant, and the non-graphic part has a hydrophilic and oil resistant. Features to print. Offset printing is actually the first to transfer the ink to the graphic or text area of ​​the metal plate or paper base plate, which is then transferred to the blanket and then transferred to the substrate.

The main components of offset inks are pigments, binders and ink additives. Pigments are colorants that are insoluble in water, oil, and organic solvents. Dyes are pigments that dissolve in water, oil, and organic solvents. The binder is made by dissolving the resin in dry vegetable oil and then using high-boiling point kerosene, adding pigments and auxiliary materials to stir and grind to produce offset printing ink. Drying mechanism for paper offset inks is the drying of the osmotic oxidative conjunctiva. That is, when the ink is printed on the paper, the ink selectively permeates into the paper, that is, the paper selectively absorbs ink components and is miscible in the system. The high-boiling point kerosene has relatively small surface tension and immediately leaves the ink system and quickly penetrates into the paper due to the absorption of the paper. The ink film is immediately fixed on the sheet, and the oxidized conjunctiva is dried slowly in the later period, generally at 24 It is completely dry after hours. Offset printing inks for paper offset inks are the most used, offset bright inks, offset sheetfed inks, offset web inks, four-color offset inks, and offset inks.

Offset printing ink is mainly used to print newspapers, books, pictures, etc. At present, printing plants in the north of China basically use Tiens brand offset printing inks produced by the Tianjin Ink Factory. Most of the southern printing plants use the Mudan brand offset printing inks produced by the Shanghai Ink Factory. The variety of offset inks produced in China is complete, and the quality is continuously improved. The output can not only meet the needs of the country, but also has a considerable amount of exports.

2, flexible letterpress ink

The earlier name for flexible inks was aniline inks because of the toxic aniline dyes used in the original inks. In 1953, the ink formulation changed. In this type of ink, new dyes and various pigments were dyed. Therefore, aniline ink was changed to a flexographic ink, also called a flexographic ink, or flexographic ink.