Study on performance of yellow water-based ink for flexographic printing

Abstract

Flexo water-based ink was currently approved as green ink by the US Food and Drug Association. However, the quality of domestic water-based flexographic ink on a non-absorbent material such as PP plastic film had obvious deficiencies. The influence of dispersion was discussed by changing the kinds of pigments, grinding resin, and pigment/resin ratio to determine the optimal dispersion of based ink. The influence of color density, gloss, surface tension, and leveling property of ink was discussed by changing the kinds of film-forming resin to adjust formula better on the based ink formula. Finally, the experiment design formula was used to optimize the experiment and then best performance of ink could be obtained. The results showed that best printing performance of yellow ink could be obtained by choosing benzidine yellow as the pigment, grinding resin 96 as the ultimate grinding resin, electing ratio of pigment to resin as 2 to 1 and choosing S2916 as the film-forming resin.