UFLEX LAUNCHES DIRECT UV OFFSET PRINTABLE POLYESTER FILM

UV offset printing on non-absorptive surfaces is getting popular by the days. It gives an ultimate packaging solution for Board Lamination and Decorative Printing. The daunting challenge in this segment however remains the availability of right kind of substrate where direct printing can be done without any primer/ treatment.

Let’s try to understand this, a little better. Liquids do not wet surfaces with free energies lower than their surface tension. On the contrary an extremely high surface free energy as compared to the surface tension of the ink will also result in poor wetting and adhesion. Therefore according to printing industry experts, for best wetting and ink adhesion on to non-absorptive surfaces the ‘dyne level’ or the surface free energy of the substrate should be about 10 dynes above the surface tension of the ink.

Unfortunately many polymeric substrates have too low surface energy required for good printing and ink adhesion and therefore the substrate has to be remedially modified in order to make it printable.

This modification is usually done with an adjustable corona treatment or by applying a suitable primer coating. Corona treatment is fast and relatively inexpensive, but surface dyne levels are susceptible to loss or decay during prolonged storage and upon contact with some fountain solutions. Precautions must be taken to obtain a uniform dyne level that is not too high. Corona treatments can at times also dramatically increase troublesome static charges in the material treated. Therefore to avoid this, primer coatings that adhere to both the substrate and to the subsequently applied inks are used. This as one could well imagine is an elaborate and time consuming process that has been posing further challenges for the convertors.

With this problem statement at hand, India’s largest multinational flexible packaging materials and Solution Company Uflex Limited has engineered a speciality polyester film F-UVC film which is suitable for direct UV offset printing without requiring any primer/ treatment. The film is available in both bare transparent and metallized variants, where the un-metallized side is used for UV offset printing and UV curing. The metallized polyester film i.e. FLEXMETPROTECTTM (F-UVC-M) is available in optical density ranging from 1.4 to 2.2. The wide range of optical densities gives choice to customer to use the product for diverse range of applications. The metal bond between the metal and the film is 130-180 gms/25mm.READ MORE… http://www.uflexltd.com/blog/?p=2971#more-2971