According to estimates, sales in the US radiation-curable ink and coating market reached $360 million in 2002. Nowadays, the market for inks such as UV-curable screen printing inks, offset printing inks, letterpress printing inks, and narrow-width flexo printing inks has also achieved such great results.
In recent years, the printing ink industry in the United States, like other industries, has struggled to survive a difficult period. Radiation-cured inks are one of the areas that are slowly developing.
Despite the bright prospects in this area, it can not escape the strong pressure caused by the rise in raw material prices. Recently, a serious shortage of acrylic acid has exposed the problem of raw material supply, which has had a negative impact on the stability of raw material prices. Last year, the prices of various types of raw materials rose in varying degrees. This trend of price increases continued until this year. Therefore, we can predict that the fluctuation of raw material prices will have a negative impact on UV/EB products.
The most used areas for UV inks are carton and label printing. However, at present, carton printing mainly uses offset printing ink, and label printing adopts narrow-width flexo printing. The use of UV gravure and UV wide flexo is negligible and almost negligible.
Composite printing presses that can use different UV printing methods are still favored by the industry.
The products printed by the free radical UV printing system have a certain odor, which has led some printers to use cationic UV inks and coatings when printing soft packages that are sensitive to odors. However, compared with traditional free radical UV products, the use of cationic UV products is still not worthy of praise.
Curing digital ink jet is a bright star in the field of radiation curing inks and coating. This emerging technology will continue to develop rapidly. Although people have been calling for a reduction in the use of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and reduced energy consumption, printers’ interest in UV-curable inkjet has only increased. The author believes that the emergence of this phenomenon has the following main reasons:
Curing ink jets have a wider range of attachments to substrates and can be applied to a wide variety of substrates.
Curing ink jets are more efficient, and print speeds are much faster than using conventional aqueous or solvent ink jets.
The cured ink jet is stable and does not clog the ink nozzle.
Products cured with UV-cured ink jets are more glossy and less prone to discoloration.
UV-curable ink jet can be used for embossing and other linked postpress operations.
Advances in technology will continue to promote the rapid development of chemical and UV/EB applications. Undoubtedly, today's UV inks have less odor, better stickiness, and greater color stability. Current high-brightness lamps and mirrors for curing inks have better thermal control performance. New UV lamps with on-off switching capabilities are also under development and will likely have some advantages of electron beam (EB) curing.
Photoresists and oligomers absorb UV energy and induce photopolymerization, which greatly reduces the use of photoinitiators and can effectively save printing costs.
Many printers today are not interested in new products unless they taste the sweetness of using new products. Compared with higher productivity, the price of UV/EB ink is minimal.
The main benefit of using energy-curable inks and coatings is to increase production efficiency. Fast printing speed, wide range of substrates, uniform colors, and good visual effects are all important factors to promote the continued rapid development of UV/EB inks and coatings.
Although UV/EB materials are favored by environmentalists due to their ability to reduce solvent emissions from printing sources, the ultimate use of this material in the food packaging industry will be a major event that deserves the attention of the industry.
UV technology has matured, and printers are still waiting to see the long-awaited sales growth and cost reduction. However, the rise in raw material prices and the slow development of UV/EB ink itself have greatly delayed the arrival of price cuts. On the contrary, prices are likely to continue to rise. The instability of raw material prices will continue to have far-reaching effects in the near future.
Source: China Fertilizer Net