The international ink manufacturer Siegwerk now offers an innovative ink system for gravure printing based on polyurethane (PUR). The new technology delivers excellent print results, while also enabling printers to simplify their portfolio, improve processes and reduce operational costs.
Siegwerk, one of the leading providers of printing inks for packaging applications and labels, is now offering a new ink range for gravure printing, which is based on a polyurethane binder system and contains no polyvinyl chloride (PVC). In this respect, Siegwerk is complying with market trends towards reducing PVC use, ink complexity and set-up times, as well as allowing for quicker changeovers between print jobs.
“Lately brand owners have expressed an increasing interest in PVC-free printing inks to realize complex packaging structures. Our new PUR-based ink system fulfills these requirements, while also incorporating other benefits,” explains Dr. Hanns Martin Kaiser, Head of Technology Flexible Packaging EMEA at Siegwerk. The new ink technology – first available for the European market – is for example optimized to meet high performance requirements – such as high bond-strength values in lamination. It allows for use in harsh retort conditions and can also be applied on modern barrier film substrates.
Another benefit is that the PUR ink system is solely based on ethyl acetate as a solvent to allow utilization in monosolvent setups in combination with solvent recovery systems. But in any case, printers can also use common co-solvents like methyl ethyl ketone (MEK), or ethanol etc. The key polyurethane binders are manufactured in Siegwerk’s own PUR production facilities in Annemasse (France) or Bhiwadi (India). “After two years of development, the new ink range performed very successful in first extended industrial trials. It showed excellent printability with solid full tone and outstanding half tone reproduction. We optimized it for best dispersion results in order to produce high color strengths,” says Dr. Hanns Martin Kaiser. Under industrial trial conditions the new PUR inks exhibited very good printability even at high printing speeds above 500 m/min. At the same time, it has been proved that the solvent retention level of the inks is very low.
