EncuPack aims to educate market on UV inks

A European Union project is aiming to improve the knowledge about best practices and troubleshooting for UV inks.

The EncuPack (Energy Curable Packaging) project is being funded by the European Union’s EuroStars research and development program and sees a group of industry and research organizations join forces to develop a training simulator and a diagnostic help system, both based on a set of structured expertise and press tests.
 
EncuPack said UV inks are one of the growth areas in printing and packaging. Advantages of UV inks include less volatile organic compounds released and the ability to print on non-absorbent substrates like metal or plastic, as well as on paper.
 
However, a barrier to the wider adoption of this technology has been the lack of knowledge about best practices and troubleshooting, particularly as UV typically requires closer tolerances and stricter printing procedures that some conventional printers have found difficult to implement, EncuPack said.
 
The partners for the EuroStars project include: MetaPrint, a leading metal decoration printer in Estonia; Sinapse Print Simulators, a French process modeling and diagnostic systems specialist; and Grenoble INP-Pagora, another French print and materials research organization.
 
In addition, a select group of leading industrial companies working with UV have joined the project as sponsors to contribute their specialized expertise and to insure that the project results are 'robust, realistic and reusable'. These sponsors include: Germany’s Felix Böttcher, IST-Metz, KBA MetalPrint and Zeller & Gmelin, as well as Finnish paper producer UPM-Kymmene.
 
The project was approved by the European Union in 2011; work among the partners started in June, and the first plenary meeting was held at the UPM Augsburg Training Center in October 2011. Project results will be available in 2014.