BASF's new flexo plate (top)

Flexo plate making is a very complicated process. Different users may have different needs. Plate makers, plate operators, and press operators must cooperate and coordinate with each other to meet the needs of end users to the maximum extent. . The task faced by the flexographic production company is to produce a flexographic printing plate with excellent performance so that it not only has a very strong market competitiveness, but also can meet a variety of different requirements, that is to say, it ultimately produces the customer's requirements. High quality flexo plate.

BASF's new flexo plate (top)
The photosensitive resin plate used in flexo printing is basically composed of four parts. The four parts include: host polymer, monomer, photoinitiator and various additives. Among them, the host polymer generally uses a resin having an elastomeric synthetic rubber system; the photoinitiator absorbs light energy and initiates a photopolymerization reaction, such as a ketone organic compound; the monomer is generally an acrylic ester; and the additive is thermally stable. Agents and additives that change the hardness of the polymer. The nature, combination, and interaction of these components can have a considerable effect on the printability of the media. If the content of each component in the photopolymer plate is changed, the properties of the plate such as ink transfer performance, service life, resolution, stability, and ozone resistance will also change to a certain extent. Affects the printability of the media.

In production practice, the production operator may need to use and fully utilize the properties of the plate such as the elasticity, hardness, and ink transfer properties of the plate, or to adapt to a specific or special purpose substrate material. Different kinds of photosensitive resin plates, tapes, gaskets and sleeve materials, the most basic requirement for the plate material is to ensure that the transferred ink layer is uniform and thick, and the dot enlargement rate is controlled at about 10%. Second, when using the traditional halftone screening method and the number of screen lines is 60 lines/cm (150 lpi), it is required that the fine intaglio (or neat lines) be clean, not sticky, and small dots or thin lines should not be lost. The continuous smoothing of color halftone transitions, etc., are also some of the basic requirements for flexo printing plates. In addition, the plate is required to be suitable for various types of ink systems, such as water-based inks, solvent-based inks, or UV inks. As for the hardness of the plate, in order to reduce the dot gain rate, the hardness of the photosensitive polymer plate should be greater than the Shore 60 (ISO), but in order to make the plate loading operation easier and faster, while reducing the debugging time, the production operator is flexible. The elasticity of the printing plate material is also relatively high.

At the same time, in order to increase the production capacity and output of the plate making process, the plate-making staff hopes that the processing speed of the plate can be faster and the processing time can be shorter, such as reducing the flushing time and the drying time. Moreover, in order to expand the range of the pre-exposure and reduce the influence of fluctuation of UVA radiation on the quality of platemaking, the back-exposure time of the plate is required to be long enough. In addition, in order to increase the production efficiency, the face exposure time is also required to be short, and the main exposure is more tolerant.

These above requirements (conflicting with each other) are not only for traditional flexographic plates, but also for digital flexographic plates. However, there is another focus issue in the digital flexo plate, that is, the final output image clarity.

As a professional flexo plate manufacturer, BASF Printing Systems' core mission and focus is to make every effort to coordinate and balance these highly competitive requirements. After careful and detailed scientific research, the company finally developed and produced a new type of nyloflex ACE flexographic printing plate on the basis of experimental development.

First, the advantages of nyloflex ACE media and digiflex ACE D media 1. The error is smaller, and it has added some new features. BASF Printing Systems develops and produces this new type of nyloflex ACE plate in a new factory in Willstatt, Germany. With advanced modern production technology and strict quality control measures, BASF Printing Systems guarantees The production error is controlled within a very small range. In addition, since the nyloflex ACE plate is made of a new type of polymer material, and the company has recently made a major improvement in its own extrusion process, it is possible to make the plate produced. The thickness error is greatly reduced.

In the flexographic printing process, in order to obtain a uniform and consistent ink transfer, the actual printing pressure used is always greater than the theoretically required ideal pressure value. This is the shortcoming of the flexographic printing process generally considered by the industry. . We know that in actual production, due to the thickness of the plate used, the plate loading system, the printing press, the sleeve, and the surface of the substrate material, etc., which are not always uniform, there are always different degrees of difference. In order to overcome these inconsistencies, it is necessary to appropriately increase the printing pressure so that the transferred ink layer is uniform and consistent. Some of the printing pressure is absorbed by the printing plate, resulting in varying degrees of dot distortion. Because the thickness error of nyloflex ACE plates is smaller than that of ordinary flexo plates (as mentioned earlier), the plate's sensitivity to printing pressure is relatively small. Even with several different nyloflex ACE plates (but the thickness of these plates are the same) printed over the entire width, the resulting prints are able to achieve very high consistency and can therefore be implemented very easily. The best adjustment of printing pressure. This new type of polymer plate has a hardness of between 60 and 64 (ISO) in Shore, and has a very high elasticity, making plate making and plate mounting easier. When using this new nyloflex ACE plate, it is recommended that you use a combination of hard compressible foam tape or a hard compressible sleeve system. Tests have shown that this special type of plate-tape or plate-sleeve combination eliminates pinholes in printing and enables uniform and consistent ink layers in the field, while maintaining a dot gain rate of 10 %about. The same applies to the digiflex ACE D digital flexo plate.

2. In the traditional platemaking process, the image is transferred from the film to the printing plate. When the traditional plate making method is used, one-to-one image transfer between the film and the printing plate must be guaranteed, which is one of the important conditions for obtaining a high-quality printing image. The characteristics of the ACE plate are: When the plate is exposed in the exposure latitude range, the accuracy of one-to-one image transfer from the film to the plate is quite high, which can be almost 100% correct. For a tone value in the range of 2% to 98%, this high reliability transfer can be realized and guaranteed. Therefore, as long as the printing characteristic curve of the flexographic printing plate is determined, the plate making company can perform plate making based on the reproducible gradation transfer curve between the film and the printing plate, and at the same time, the damage probability of the printing plate can be reduced.