TAKE-OFF TIME FOR TEXTILE INKJET Written by FESPA
Tuesday, 22 February 2011 14:40
John Scrimshaw, moderator of FESPA’s Digital Textile Conference, looks at the prospects for 2011
This is already shaping up to be a pivotal year for digital textile printing. Many expect 2011 to be the year in which inkjet technology’s steady progress in the garment and soft-signage sectors will at last be matched by accelerated take-up in the mainstream textile-printing industry.
If this projection turns out to be correct, there is a potential bonanza in store for the machinery and ink manufacturers. World production of printed textiles is currently around 27 billion square metres and could rise to 32 billion square metres by 2015. Estimates of the proportion printed by inkjet are uncertain, but most people in the industry accept that it is no more than 1-2%.
Speed and quality drive digital take-up
Despite the promise of the technology over the past decade, the equipment has hitherto been too slow and the inks too expensive to compete with traditional screenprinting in volume production. This calculation began to change, however, with the widespread adoption of a new generation of print heads, capable of jetting water-based inks at speed and in high resolution.
Improved performance encouraged greater adoption of the technology in high-value-added areas, such as the silk-printing cluster in Italy’s Como region. And as the volumes have slowly increased, the ink price has come down – so that today, a comparison between the economics of digital and screen methods often results in an entirely different conclusion from the one that might have been reached only two years ago.
Even in early 2010, Italy’s MS was making the claim that its MS-JPK series of machines had rendered flatbed screenprinting redundant. Now we are anticipating the launch of its super-fast relative, the MS-RIO – to be unveiled in May at FESPA Digital in Hamburg. This new machine, we are told, will print at the astonishing speed of 7,200 sqm/hour, becoming a genuine competitor with rotary screenprinting.
These new-generation machines, like Reggiani’s ReNOIR (400 sqm/hour) and the forthcoming Stork Sphene (550 sqm/hour) employ Kyocera print heads, which are emerging as today’s technology of choice for water-based inks. However, these heads are reputed to have a price tag of $8,000 each, as a result of which the 200-head MS-RIO will cost €2 million.
What the industry needs is something equally effective but much cheaper – such as the Memjet head that was the subject of a recent partnership deal with the Chinese office computer manufacturer Lenovo, which will make it the basis of a new office printer. Although commercial information about the deal is scarce, the expected cost of the printer suggests the price of the heads themselves is in the low hundreds, rather than thousands, of dollars. If the Memjet head proves reliable, it can only be a matter of time before someone, somewhere, decides to trial it with textile inks.
Not just print...
As its name suggests, the Memjet head is manufactured using MEMS (Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems) technology. Such systems represent a new generation of micro-engineered devices that contain miniaturised sensors, actuators and structures, which can all be merged on to a common silicon substrate. In theory, they can achieve the highest performance at a manufacturing cost lower than that of traditionally engineered systems.
And as inkjet printing begins to achieve its potential in volume production, such as apparel fabrics and home textiles, so another related but quite different area of the textile market may be opening up to it. Over several years the European Digitex project, led by the Dutch technical-textile producer TenCate and its UK-based inkjet-technology subsidiary Xennia, laboured to demonstrate that inkjet can accurately and consistently apply functional chemicals across the whole surface of a fabric, imparting qualities such as water- and soil-repellency. The project reached its conclusion late in 2010, with the result that this year TenCate is introducing the technology at one of own factories, producing awnings.
Chemicals such as these normally have to be applied by immersion of the fabric in large, high-energy-consuming machines that also use large amounts of water and produce a waste stream that has to be treated before it can be release to drains – so the successful application of inkjet could have strong attractions for a significant portion of the textile industry.
The development will exploit a novel printing technology known as ‘diagonal multi-pass’, developed by Xennia in partnership with the Italian machinery builder Reggiani, which itself has been one of the more interesting technical innovations of the past year.
Explore the trends in expert hands
Both the super-fast printing development from MS of Italy and Xennia’s industrial inkjet coating technology will be among the advances described at FESPA Digital Textile Europe, a one-day conference in Hamburg, Germany, on May 25 – the second day of the FESPA Digital show.
In a wide-ranging programme, the conference will delve into both the technical and commercial trends in all areas of digital textile printing.