Why move to fixed anilox printing?
Ben Howell, Technical Sales Manager – Export at Pulse Roll Label Products, outlines the benefits of standardise your anilox selection.
Aniloxes are a critical part of any flexo manufacturing environment and are central to delivering successful and continuous print quality.
When you standardise your anilox selection, they can also be an easy way to unlock efficiency and make presses more profitable.
We have introduced Monolox fixed anilox printing technology to achieve exactly that. Specifically, Monolox serves as an alternative solution for spot colours and challenges the accepted norm of having different anilox volumes for different colours and applications. The use of fixed aniloxes is already an accepted practice when printing with a fixed colour palette. This improves consistency, ensures repeatability and enhances efficiency. So why is it not the same for spot colours?
Ink strength has been one contributing factor to the normalisation of different aniloxes for different jobs and applications over the years. As flexo took off as a viable print process for labels during the 1980s and 1990s, ink formulations at that time could only reach a certain strength. This resulted in the need for different aniloxes of different volumes to print colours at the strength needed. Since the early 2000s, Pulse Roll Label has worked to evolve ink chemistry and keep up with developments in hardware that make flexo a process befitting the 21st Century. Our inks are formulated with a high pigment load to deliver stronger colours. This is evidenced in the development of the high-strength, single-pigment PureTone® ink solutions, which makes the Monolox fixed anilox printing system possible and allows the use of rollers with a common low volume on all print stations.
Substrates can greatly affect ink transfer properties and impact colour density, making them another factor that can lead to additional anilox inventory being required. The calibration and audit process that the Pulse technical team provides during the switch to Monolox fixed anilox printing mitigates this issue by identifying and grouping substrates where ink transfer is similar to one another. This makes it possible to reduce anilox inventory to an absolute minimum, as well as identifying where additional anilox profiles are required, if at all.
As well as keeping the number of aniloxes required to a minimum, having to regularly change aniloxes results in under-utilisation of equipment and a drop in pressroom efficiency. This time-consuming and labour-intensive process creates downtime and stops presses in their tracks when they should be running at full speed. Working to the rule of the more you print, the more money you make, standardising your aniloxes around a single low volume makes perfect sense, as you immediately minimise the associated business risks from a broken anilox and reduce the need to reformulate inks to suit a new anilox set.
Analysis based on average figures for typical working hours and business costs shows that adding just 5% uptime results in around 200 additional hours of working time per press, which equates to a bottom line boost in excess of €40,000 a year from each machine. Monolox will add far more than 5% back onto a press in uptime, increasing equipment efficiency, providing additional capacity, and ratcheting up the revenue potential of each colour station and press.
Importantly, aniloxes from any brand or supplier are suitable for embracing the Monolox way. Rather, the benefits are made when aniloxes are exposed to powerful software and sophisticated data to fingerprint and calibrate them; and a bespoke mixing database is used to formulate the high-strength, single-pigment Pulse PureTone® inks. This combination makes it entirely possible to produce any spot colour using just one low volume anilox.
The result of using Monolox fixed anilox printing is big returns for printers: increased utilisation of equipment; the addition of saleable hours back into operations through increased press uptime; and reduced anilox and ink inventories required to produce an endless array of spot colours and jobs. This was demonstrated at a recent workshop at Mark Andy Poland in Warsaw, where the reality and capability of using fixed anilox printing for spot colours was demonstrated to converters from across Europe.
Now there is no need to change aniloxes, other than to clean and maintain them!
