From individual to industrial use
The cleaning and pre-treatment solution for glass printing was developed in a partnership and tested in small and large glass print volumes for indoor, and outdoor application with indirect exposure to the elements. The development of the solution and the first stage of the tests for product resistance were achieved in the beginning of the year 2009. The solution was presented at the In-house show in February 2009, and its scalable principle showed our customers the care and the support from small production batches to industrial volume in all aspects of quality.
Today there is the choice of having a fully working portable solution that is present already in the field and reliably treating up to 140m2 glass as the UV inks have the excellent reputation that they may decorate any material. 'Hélas', when this ink was released somewhere in the 1990’s there was less knowledge about architectural materials and even less vision of the huge potential the UV ink is presenting for the very fast moving industry of today. The portable solution is perfect for individual use with a very good profitability price-quality profile, but does have the limitations caused by human fatigue while cleaning and human imperfection while pre-treating not present in the higher volume automated system.
The pre-treatment can be enhanced by an XY table system with interchangeable heads. One head unit for the flame coating, and a separate head unit for the adhesion promoter. Even further there is the possibility of using a pre-treatment machine for mass production that is aligned with the speeds of the UV printing and the cleaning. The cleaning may be performed with equipment to obtain speeds that permit linking all the steps into a continuous process.