Much of the innovations we have done for inks are not visible to the end-user except as an experience in the form of performance of our ink products.
However, it is still worthwhile to know our journey of innovation at every step involved in development of ink formulations and process of ink production. We will keep the narration minimal.
As a conscious decision we decided to focus only on water based ink development as we wanted to contribute our bit in protecting our environment by producing sustainable products.
However, it is still worthwhile to know our journey of innovation at every step involved in development of ink formulations and process of ink production. We will keep the narration minimal.
As a conscious decision we decided to focus only on water based ink development as we wanted to contribute our bit in protecting our environment by producing sustainable products.
Formulation
When we started development of ink, we were faced with a situation. The processes defined in literature were too slow for obtaining a feedback. We designed our own methods for quick feedback that allowed us to expedite the process of ink formulation development by several folds. This is when we realized that why formulation is still an art. These methods helped us identify the right components quickly and their impact on the various aspects of ink properties. Till date these methods continue to aid in our rapid development of formulations. This is the reason why we are able to offer ink formulations in our ink portfolio, covering print-heads from low viscosity range to high viscosity range.
Nano Technology
Working with colorants that are water insoluble requires suspensions with nano-sized particles. There was always a choice available for us to buy suspensions from third party and use them in our formulations. Infact, we tried doing so but were not very happy with the resulting formulations. We wanted high performance from our inks, so we decided to invest not only in resources for our own nano-grinding infrastructure but we also invested resources in understanding physical and chemical aspect of suspension chemistry.
Just to illustrate, when we used the commonly available polymers to create suspension for our sublimation dyes, we found them to be not very suitable as it would fail in our accelerated aging test for stability. That left us wondering how the industry accepts it. We soon found our answer to this question that industry follows lower temperature for accelerated aging tests. We were not convinced with this approach. We wanted to subject our inks to the same rigorous standards as for water soluble dyes. We ultimately found the material of our choice (not commonly used by industry) that would let us achieve the standards we were looking for. This is where our quest to understand the physical and chemical aspect of suspension chemistry helped us. Though it took us about 3 years to release our Sublimation inks, we are very happy that at last it meets the level of quality standards that we expect them to be at and not what was acceptable in the market.
Ofcourse, this also has allowed us to release some of the interesting shades in our Disperse dye chemistry also, including those Disperse dyes which are otherwise very difficult to bring in nano-suspension and stabilize for extended period of shelf-life.
Ink Production
Then was the challenge to setup the processes involved in production. We wanted to have full control over every measurable property of the ink and raw material. So, we designed our own processing equipment, when we could not find a desired one from the market. We designed our own equipment particularly for nano-filtration and dye cleaning, so that we are able to get the level of purification that we needed for ink formulation. We also use best of the analysis methods and tools for qualifying our raw materials.
Our understanding of the basics allowed us to scale our production from lab to bulk easily as knew what parameters to look for in order to achieve the same quality as lab.
Our understanding of the basics allowed us to scale our production from lab to bulk easily as knew what parameters to look for in order to achieve the same quality as lab.