Screen printing ink status quo and market development trend (1)

Ink printing has always played an important role in screen printing. It not only determines the quality of screen printing products, but also affects the screen printing speed. The characteristics of screen printing are many, and the most prominent one is the strong adaptability of printing. It is a printing method capable of printing on all materials and substrates with different shapes and surfaces except for air and water, and the thickness of printed ink layers. It can reach 60 microns, which is 4 times the thickness of the gravure ink layer. Because of this, there are many kinds of screen printing inks, and the ink system is very complicated. At present, there are no less than two thousand screen printing inks, and the consumption is very large. The US screen printing ink market alone has sales of about 125 million US dollars. Although screen-printed substrates are extremely versatile and have different requirements for inks, and even very different, there is a common problem with screen-printing inks - the problem of curing and drying inks. When the printing speed of the screen printing machine exceeds 100-120 ft/min, the commonly used air drying screen printing ink cannot be adapted, and even if the UV curing ink (UV ink for short) is used, it is not easy to dry. At present, the international community is very concerned about the fast and inexpensive screen printing ink drying system. Ultraviolet light radiation curable ink and electron beam curable ink are two types of inks with great market development potential in screen printing inks.

1. China's screen printing industry and screen printing ink demand and production

China's screen printing industry started late compared with European and American countries. The development and application of modern screen printing technology began in the early 1980s. After entering the 1990s, with the growth of the industrial economy, the screen printing industry has developed accordingly. There are more than 30,000 screen printing factories in China, but among them, small factories (below 40 people) account for 53%, large factories (above 100 people) only account for 5%, and the rest are medium-sized factories (40-90 people). There are about 150,000 employees. The annual output value of screen printing is about 40 billion yuan, and it maintains a growth rate of 15% per year.

According to the survey, the annual average consumption of ink by the screen printing factory is approximately 782 kg. The total annual consumption of screen printing ink in the country is more than 20,000 tons (including fabric printing paste), of which about 55% is imported screen printing ink. The larger the proportion of screen printing factories using imported ink, the greater the proportion. The reasons for the large number of imported inks are as follows: First, there are few types of domestic inks and the output is low, which cannot meet the requirements of users. Second, the quality of some high-end domestic inks is not yet stable.

The development of China's domestic screen printing inks (abbreviated as screen printing inks) can be said to have grown from scratch and from small to large. There are now more than 50 manufacturers producing screen printing inks in the Mainland, and there are more than 20 companies with a certain scale. The company produces about 130 kinds of products (including silk printing paste, luminous, fluorescent, reflective and other special screen printing inks), and employs about 1,500 people. The annual output of printing and dyeing inks is about 8,000 tons, and the output value is about 240 million yuan. At the same time, special screen printing inks for special substrates such as trichromatic inks and UV light inks still need to be imported. According to statistics, the total sales of imported screen printing inks is about 450 million yuan.

The above survey data fully shows that there is still a large gap between domestic screen printing inks in terms of output, variety, and quality and the current market demand, and it is inconsistent with the high development trend that China's screen printing industry maintains an annual growth rate of 15%. In recent years, some advanced foreign companies have established ink factories in China, which will help China improve the technology and quality of screen printing inks and develop new types of inks. For example, the UFIDA ink factory in Zhongshan, Guangdong, whose brand is “Youlian Ink”, has a relatively complete range of ink types and series. The main products that have been put on the market include screen printing plastics and rubber series inks, outdoor advertising inks, and household appliances. Series inks, children's toys, non-toxic inks, special packaging series inks, circuit board (PCB) series inks, metal glass inks, UV plastic series inks, body advertising inks, membrane switch inks, pad printing inks, credit card inks, special strong hiding power Ink and screen printing lottery ink. The marketing features of UFI ink factory are: through market research, products are provided for the needs of users. The factory does not care about the size of production batches. Even if it is orders of tens of kilograms of ink, they accept it. And as long as users need, there are no varieties on the market, they can use the modern ink research and experiment center owned by the company to research and develop specifically for users. At the same time, the factory has a standard ink detection method, and it is the first screen printing ink production factory in Asia that has passed ISO-9002 and QS-9000 standard certification at the same time.

In general, with the expansion of the application of screen printing technology in the industrial sector, the production of screen printing ink in China has achieved certain development. Currently, there are both solvent-based inks suitable for various printing materials, and newly developed screen printing inks. Base inks and UV curable inks. The quality is also good, but there are also deficiencies. Due to the wide range of screen printing substrates, metals, plastics, ceramics, glass, paper, leather, rubber, enamel, wood, textiles, and non-woven fabrics, etc. The material is compatible with the ink, and it is not yet fully satisfactory. In addition, the screen printing inks in the Mainland have a certain gap with the international advanced level in terms of gloss, vividness, fineness, adhesion, odor, and printability. The main reason is that the pigments, resins and other raw materials used to produce inks are not complete in domestic varieties. Sometimes the production of high-quality ink, some raw materials rely on imports, thus affecting China's screen printing ink manufacturing industry.

2. Screen printing "green" ink development trend

The three new exhibits and materials presented by FESPA held in the last German Drupa, SGIA in the United States, and Spain show that the world's screen printing inks are developing in a direction of quick-drying, non-toxic and non-polluting. Of course, the development of screen printing inks depends on the expansion of screen printing applications. At present, the application of screen printing technology in the world has expanded into the printing field of packaging and decoration industry, advertising industry, and building materials industry. This requires screen printing inks must adapt to the development of screen printing to large-scale, multi-color and combined printing. For example, large-format outdoor advertising or building materials are screen printed, requiring multicolor printing and rapid drying. Combining printing refers to the combination of screen printing and offset printing, gravure printing or flexographic printing to form a filament printing press (ie offset-silk combined printing press) or a flexible printing press (flexo-silk combined printing press). Currently such equipment has been sold on the international market. Due to the production of adhesive silk screen or soft silk screen printing machines, screen printing inks are required to have a certain drying speed. In addition, the combined printing method is currently mostly used for packaging printing, so the ink is also required to be non-toxic, odorless, and non-polluting. Now there are three kinds of "green" inks that meet the above requirements for screen printing development. One is screen printing water-base ink, and the other two are ultraviolet light curing inks and electron beam radiation curing inks.