Inca Digital and single pass printing

Earlier this year I went to a conference, organised by IMI Europe, where some of the practical considerations in developing an inkjet printing system were discussed. This included a presentation by Nick Campbell, project development manager for Inca Digital, who talked about the difficulties in developing a single pass press.

Nick Campbell of Inca Digital

Campbell explained: “The art of good printing is to get good quality print from not so good printheads. So we need to measure the problems and modify the dots you send to the prints to correct this.” He says it’s inevitable that nozzles on the head will become blocked, adding: “You need to be able to detect and correct for it whilst printing and this needs to be designed from the beginning. Drop formation is never perfect and you frequently get satellite drops. You have to be able to collect and manage satellite mist.”

He identified a range of problems such as aligning large numbers of printheads close to a moving substate, noting: “We have to hold the printhead over a web of substrate that might sway from side to side by a few tens of microns and if it does then you need to track that movement. So the actual process of managing the substrate is very difficult.”

Inca Digital has been remarkably successful in developing wide format flatbed printers, concentrating mainly on the high volume end of the market. The latest OnsetX series are phenomenally fast beasts capable of challenging offset and screen printing. Behind the scenes, Inca engineers have worked with the parent company, Screen, on various industrial inkjet projects. This includes developing a 2.8m wide corrugated printer for BHS that will run at 300mpm. Campbell comments: “We have been pretty successful but we see the market starting to saturate and so to develop our business we want to move into single pass printing for industrial applications.”

To this end, Inca has built a 1.6m wide roll-fed printer at its base in Cambridge. Campbell explains: “We don’t have an application for the 1.6m wide printer. It was an upscaling of a smaller printer. We wanted to find the next layer of problems that would come with a bigger printer. So the reason for building it was to develop our skills and to act as a sales tool that we could show to people. We have also been using it to develop some of the specific techniques for the large BHS corrugated printer.”

Inevitably, each application also throws up its own issues. He explains: “Before you build the printer you have to understand the print process and I think this is the most difficult part of developing a single pass printer. You want to achieve good print quality with good sharp text and colour gamut and it has to work with the rest of the process. So the ink might have to be compatible with a machine process.”

Campbell rattled through a whole list of further considerations: “Does the printed item go through the rest of the print process? Can you print all the ink in one go or do you need to dry or pin it between the colours? What order to put the colours down in? What substrates will they actually use in the manufacturing process? Do you need to do any pre- or post-curing?” He adds: “It’s only when you know all these things that you can design the final machine or you could end up building the wrong printer.”

He notes: “You can’t make a generic printer because each print process will need a dedicated print process and that process determines the configuration of the whole machine.” He concludes: “It’s not easy but that’s what makes it a good area to work in.”

I’ll post reports from some of the other presentations over the next couple of months. In the meantime you can see more details on the IMI Europe website, including upcoming events.


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