Together with industry partners, manroland is active in the Nanocure Project, focusing the behaviour of inks and coatings in printing segment. Here’s brief.

The selective transfer of knowledge, within the print value-adding chain increases the attractiveness of the printing industry and its products. This is why manroland AG is active in a variety of ways in research projects and teams concerning nanotechnology. One of such projects is the Nanocure Project where manroland together with partner companies is expediting nanotechnological applications in the field of printing, especially researching the behaviour of inks and coatings in printing systems.

Over the years, radiation-hardening polymerization methods have developed very rapidly in the printing industry and also in the fields of surface coating of metals for example. The Nanocure Project focuses on nanotechnological applications for radiation curing. The project partners cover the entire processing chain of the planned new inks and coatings: Sustech, Darmstadt, and the INM-Leibniz Institut for Neue Materialien, Saarbrücken, are examining selective modification of the source materials; Zeller + Gmelin is responsible for further processing of the modified photoinitiators into application-compliant UV-curable printing inks and coatings; Eltosch Torsten Schmidt is researching suitable UV-curing systems and is optimizing these regarding their energy consumption; manroland is examining the use of the new inks and coatings in printing presses; and the Universität des Saarlandes, Physikalische Chemie, is carrying out important accompanying research, for instance in analyzing coatings.

The advantages of these novel research approaches will make UV printing even more attractive. In the yesteryears, the average growth rate in the consumption of UV printing inks lay around five until eight percent. The reason for this is the higher productivity that comes from instantaneous hardening which permits print products to move from the press to the finishing operations without delay. Other advantages of UV technologies stem from the fact that they are solvent-free. Even non-absorbent materials that are hard to print by conventional methods such as foils can be printed with UV inks in outstanding quality.

However, these advantages are opposed by certain challenges like high energy costs for drying and the possible migration of organic photoinitiators to packaged products. Therefore the partners in the Project are conducting research to find a new class of modified photoinitiators and UV-curable printing inks.