Flexo Technology accuracy of the ink droplets. The lowering of the
heads, in turn, prompted the installation of an automatic splice detection system using sensors, in order to trigger an increase in the distance between the print heads and the substrate at short notice, when splices were detected in the web, and to protect the print heads from damage. This phase is generally referred to at Gallus as the period in which the company implemented fundamental development steps that led to stable, continuous operation of the hybrid printing systems, and ensured the company a leading position in the elimination of process errors. Backed by the established Labelfire technology, at the start of the third phase in 2022 Gallus focused on innovative “ease of use” concepts. Developments that simplify digital printing and take the strain off operators – an increasingly important aspect, particularly in the age of a shortage of skilled workers. This included the further development of the “Vision System” into a highly automated variant with which a test chart can be printed between each job and not just manually once a day, as is usually the case. This automated solution provides the operator with quick assistance when “weak nozzles” occur, which only become apparent during day-to-day operations. Their direct elimination affects the print quality through the greatest possible process stability and consistency.
Greater user-friendliness and standardisation are also achieved by cleaning the printheads in a fully automated cleaning process, for which the operator can additionally activate an ultrasonic cleaning step.
In practice, this design solution has proven itself to such an extent that physical contact with the printheads is no longer necessary during the cleaning process, and the cleaning principle is proving to be ground-breaking for standardised cleaning of printheads.
For cleaning, the cleaning boxes with flood cleaning and ultrasonic cleaning units move under the fixed print heads
The fixed installation of the print bars and print heads also contributes to user-friendliness. Permanently mounted printheads minimise the need for servicing and, thanks to this lower maintenance requirement, lead to significantly higher machine availability and thus an increase in productivity.
In general, all these design solutions are based on a high degree of automation with defined standards that enable the efficient integration of digital printing into hybrid machine systems.
THE CONVENTIONAL INFLUENCE ON HYBRID PRINTING TECHNOLOGY But it is not only digital printing that has gained in performance for hybrid press solutions. In parallel, the conventional basic/carrier press side has also evolved and its level of automation has increased in favour of user-friendliness. A press pre-set, for
example, enables a job to be set up quickly by retrieving all press setting data from the job file. Among other things, format length and format length correction, substrate data with substrate type, web thickness and width, and web transport settings with web tension and web stretch are all pre-set. The automation also includes longitudinal and cross register pre-setting, which does this for each printing unit on every job, as well as permanent register control and regulation during the run. This is a real convenience feature that frees the press operator from this otherwise constant monitoring task over the entire run.
HYBRID IS ON THE RISE
With web-to-web register control, sensors measure the distance between register mark and reference mark
If you look at the increase in performance in digital printing on the one hand and the higher degree of automation of conventional press parts on the other, this can be put together to form a coherent picture in the construction of hybrid systems. The market is currently witnessing an increase in the development of new hybrid digital flexo presses as well as digital presses with inline finishing and/or flexo units, even if various finishing processes such as screen printing, hot foil stamping, digital foiling and digital varnishing still somewhat slow down the inline process. Depending on the order structure, the future often lies in inline operation, especially for medium to long runs and a medium degree of finishing. In this situation, it is not surprising that the Gallus One, recently presented as a stand- alone machine, also follows the hybrid DNA of the St Gallen mechanical engineering company and contains the expansion capability to become an inline machine or hybrid digital flexographic printing machine.
32
June 2023
www.convertermag.com
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