Evolution of decoration process in ceramic coatings industry: inkjet printing

Abstract

Over the past 20 years ceramics companies seek incessantly improve their technologies to become more competitive in the world market. The decorative system most commonly used in ceramics industry is the rotocolor, however it has limitations that affect the quality and production of ceramic tiles. Thus, an increasing number of companies are adapting to the new printing system for inkjet decoration to their products. Based on this information this work is to verify the characteristics of the decorating process inks for inkjet and investigate the benefits of using this system when compared to rotocolor system. The work was performed by laboratory experiments and literature. The following laboratory tests were performed: density and viscosity flow time, particle size distribution, rheological determination, X-ray diffractometry, optical microscopy at 200x magnification and colorimetry. Based on these results it was possible to detect that the inks present not nanoscale features related theoretical context which to be a nanometric material is due to contain all particle sizes below 100 nm, but the inks present as smaller value of 105.7 nm. Through these results it was possible to explain some technical problems which usually occur in the printers and through the micrograph analysis it was demonstrated that the fingerprint technique is more efficient and provides higher quality compared to products by rotocolor printing system. It turned out that by changing the sintering temperature, ie necessary temperatures before the usual modifications in the ovens of industries producing coating ceramic tiles occurs a difference in shade in all colors of ΔE up to six points.

Keywords:
rotocolor; jet printing ink; ceramic decoration