Application of Secondary Printing Technology in Label Printing

As the label printing market matures, the label industry is ushering in an unprecedented development opportunity. At the same time, the traditional label industry is also evolving to a higher level. As orders are getting shorter and shorter, the requirements of the process are getting higher and higher.

The increase in the requirements of the printing process is mainly reflected in the combination of various printing methods. The era of the past, dominated by a single letterpress printing, is gone forever. The effect to be expressed on the label is not only the letterpress effect, but also the flexographic effect, the offset printing effect, the bronzing effect, and the screen effect. The high-end red wine label even needs the embossing effect and the like.

The improvement of the printing accuracy requirements is mainly reflected in the realization of the multi-process combination, but also has a very high overprint accuracy. However, this requirement cannot be achieved due to the limitations of the existing equipment. We cannot avoid the fact that the current domestic label printing is still based on the fact that Toppan, or single flexo printing, is the main reality.

To achieve this breakthrough, without increasing the new investment in the main equipment, to solve the market's high precision requirements for the new process can only be solved in two ways:

1. Add supplementary functions to existing devices and can not affect printing accuracy

2, offline to implement all the new process supplement

Regardless of any of the above methods, secondary overprinting is an unavoidable issue. In the following, we will introduce the working principles and the scope of applications for the reference of these two methods.

First we talk about the installation of the existing equipment.

Before discussing this plan, we first analyze the current status of domestic equipment. As mentioned above, the domestic label printing method is mainly based on the letterpress or single flexo. In general, for the fine printing, these two methods are basically able to meet, but the special effects required, such as: three-dimensional effect, strong metal effect, soft relief effect, but it is unable to meet. This requires consideration of additional installations where the equipment can be extended or where there are enough stations.

In all retrofitting processes, the addition of gravure printing is the most difficult, because the printing pressure and tension required for gravure are very large. In this way, in the overall control, if it is not properly controlled, it is very easy to have an impact on the original printing methods and tension, which will affect overprinting and affect the final print product.

The illustrated gravure printing unit provides a secondary overprinting control command through an independent full servo system, and implements precise overprinting by performing compensation in a floating roller in the system. No matter how the material or the original printing equipment is adjusted, the speed-up and speed-down control, regardless of whether the original equipment is the spindle drive or the servo drive, this gravure system can realize the synchronization without speed difference with the original system, and it does not change the original. Some tension, so you can completely track the original overprint, in order to achieve process supplements and upgrades.

The system has been successfully retrofitted on different types of equipment and overprint accuracy can be achieved with less than +/- 0.15 mm. It is worth mentioning that two sets of this gravure printing unit have been successfully installed on the big wheel of Guangzhou Meihe Label Printing Co., Ltd., and they have been operating smoothly, becoming the world's first gravure printing machine installed on the large wheel relief printing plate. unit.

Reminder: The required installation conditions are only for the proper installation station, or the equipment is allowed to extend to provide the installation station.