Key Innovations that allow Low Migration Digital Printing with UV-curable Inks

Abstract

The advent of digital printing techniques about 30 years ago, announced a new era at first in small scale office and home printing, further has emerged in industrial scale printing in a large variety of wide and super wide format applications and is now being rolled out in even more exciting applications ranging from high speed document printing over (food) packaging to product decoration and shows even strong growth in ceramic tile printing.This paper focuses on the use of UV-curable inkjet inks for food packaging applications. Agfa has been playing a leading role in Low Migration digital printing with UV-curable inks and is continuously performing necessary research to keep this leading role. As inkjet printing technology evolves, also the inks have to evolve accordingly. Unfortunately for Low Migration printing, one of the trends goes to lower viscosity inks to cope with the newest generations of high speed, high resolution printheads. Even lower viscous monomers have to be used, increasing the migration risk. The current paper covers specific innovations in terms of chemistry to be able to combine low viscosity and low migration: the main focus lies on the use of a primer to capture any migrating monomer molecules.