PARAMETERS INFLUENCING FLEXO PRINTING ON WHITE TOP LINER BOARD, 2008 PAPERCON Conference

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Flexo printing for packaging material is constantly rising and increasingly able to compete against rotogravure printing in terms of quality and economy. This printing technology is the most common method for printing on corrugated board either pre- or post printed and is executed often on the same line as it converts a corrugated pad into a box. In this study uncoated and coated white top linerboard were compared in flexo printing. The coated white top liner was produced with two different coating formulations using three different application methods; bent blade, rod, metered size press. All samples were calendered under the same conditions and printed using a flexo printing unit at the DFTA Technology Centre at the Stuttgart Media University, Germany. The print quality was compared to the physical properties of the board surface in order to establish a correlation between pore structure and print quality in flexo printing. It was shown that smoothness alone is not sufficient to result in good printability. Two other parameters of interest also need to be considered, these being the contact angle of the coating, which is a measure of the wettability of a surface, and the water absorption speed.