Episode 26 - Thermal Inkjet as a choice for Industrial Speciality Projects and applications - An interview with Roberta Sirio - SICPA

In this episode of the FuturePrint podcast, Frazer Chesterman speaks to Roberta Sirio, B2B Sales Director at SICPA, about SICPA’s history of innovation in high security ink production, and Sirio’s focus on developing the OEM inkjet market globally.

This episode also takes a look at SICPA’s thermal inkjet printheads and their investment in R&D for the formulation of new inks to expand thermal inkjet’s application scope, and a discussion about thermal inkjet’s potential in the packaging market.

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Read the full interview transcription below:

Tell us a bit about Sicpa, the history and in particular your role and your background?

SICPA is a leading global provider of secured authentication, identification and traceability solutions and services to governments, central banks, high security printers and industry. Founded in 1927, it is headquartered in Switzerland and operates in five continents, SICPA’s core expertise is in high security inks, which are used to protect the majority of the world’s banknotes and security documents from the threats of counterfeiting and fraud.

In 2013 SICPA took the decision to acquire the inkjet division of Olivetti to vertically integrate the technologies in marking and coding, for the traceability solutions. A few years later, following significant R&D investments on the cartridges and inks portfolio, it was decided to offer the technology to OEM Partners. It is at that point that - because of my background includes over 15 years in the printing industry at Olivetti, I was asked to move from my previous activities at SICPA to develop the OEM Ink jet market on a global level in the role of B2B Sales Director.

Explain about your R&D dept in Italy and HQ in Switzerland

SICPA HQ is in Switzerland near Lausanne, where the corporate functions, R&D, central coordination of operations and manufacturing are based. SICPA has a network of Center of Excellence in the five continents. In Italy, near Aosta, we have the CoE for thermal inkjet, where R&D and manufacturing of cartridges are based.

SICPA's inkjet team is uniquely specialized in microfluidic design, inks formulation for InkJet technologies, material science and silicon processes, mechanical and electronic design and real-time embedded firmware. Those skills and expertise in developing printer products built-up through decades of activity in inkjet make SICPA an ideal supplier and partner to OEMs in the digital printing domain.

In this Podcast you want to talk about the amazing range of opportunities for Thermal Inkjet What are the benefits of thermal Inkjet versus other incumbent technologies that make it possible TIJ as a choice in Industrial and speciality applications.

Well, Thermal DOD was introduced in the 1980s by Canon and Hewlett-Packard. In the 90s Olivetti signed a cross-licence agreement with those two companies and developed a very successful line of facsimiles machines and office printers, contributing with hundreds of patents to the evolution of thermal inkjet technology. In the 1990’s and 2000’s the technology evolved to address the consumer photo printing market and it made it possible to do high-quality photos printing at home. Great enhancements were achieved in the colour pipeline management by the R&D teams of these three companies. 

By and large, in the past, thermal inkjet has been mostly associated to the consumer market, because everyone was used to having an inkjet desktop printer at home or in the office. The limitation of thermal inkjet in the industrial market was due to the limited variety of inks  available for TIJ, because this method is compatible with inks that have high vapour pressure, low boiling point and high kogation stability (that is the residual dye left from the continuous heating and cooling of the thermistor). Typically water based inks.

To expand the applications latitude, SICPA is investing in research and development in the formulation of new inks allowing to print on a variety of substrates, such as PC, PVC, PP, PE, PET, PETG, ABS, PU, PA PLA, and PMMA.  The inks family now includes water based, solvent based (ethanol, more eco-friendly than MEK) and UV cured inks. Inks available allowed SICPA to expand the market beyond printing on paper-based substrates in coding & marking to new applications, that require printing on plastic and other medias. Obviously, the standard cartridges and print engines previously used with aqueous inks have to be adapted and modified accordingly.

I know you are looking at integrating physical and digital in various domains. Can you give us an example of applications . How would this work?

The digital and physical worlds are more and more interlaced. We see it in every domain. In currencies, in identity solutions, in brand protection and in security printing. An example of where those worlds are coming together are fully digital applications that need to prove the authenticity of a citizen using a physical identity document. I am referring for instance to mobile identification solutions or electronic voting systems, where a crypted code is printed on a physical card and the owner’s identity and authenticity of the document can be proof-read with a mobile device. SICPA has enabled printing high quality Identification cards and has also developed a digital authentication seal that can be printed on them. Those cards can be used to identify people, goods and companies, whose authenticity can be verified both visually and digitally with an APP. 

Life sciences is also another area of interest – tell me more?

Correct, Life Science is a fascinating domain and there are various applications where the technology used in Inkjet can be applied in the area for example of:

• miniaturized lab-on-chip that enables for example to select individual cells from a blood sample and exploit the same principles of microfluidics that are used in the design of a thermal printhead

• in the micro-dosing of bio fluids, such as DNA strains, that can be deposited using TIJ heads on a micro-array used to perform In Vitro Diagnosis or can be used to spray micro doses of medicaments in consumer devices or hospital equipment in ICU units or surgery rooms

• in printing secure authentication marks onto medical devices and equipment consumables and spare parts to guarantee the authenticity, or to print security seals onto health certificates.

You also have looked at 3D and Toys – tell me about this?

Well, in general CMY inks of a colour printhead can be used to print in colour not only on paper, but thanks to the latitude of inks it can print on a variety of substrates. A CMY TIJ printhead can be used to print on white threads in cotton and polyester for textile and on PLA threads with solvent CMY inks. Indeed, the technology is being used by one of our partners in a 3D printer targeting the hobbyist and educational markets. 

In the past, we were also in discussion with a major toys producers for a couple of projects. The advantage is that the technology is accessible to end users and easy to use.

We talk a lot about Packaging and in particular the challenges of Inks on food – how does Thermal inkjet help with this? Explain more about the UV cured inks you have developed for thermal inkjet.

Printing on food primary packaging is challenging because it has to be guaranteed the ink components do not migrate. So, the more eco-friendly the ink the better. We have had an interesting application in the food decoration with edible inks, so that the printed images could literally be eaten without risks. The personalization of cakes and chocolates is very popular. Sticking to the packaging, we have developed the water-based UV cured inks that guarantee good adherence, no migration and have also developed a cost-effective UV lamp led based that can ease the integration of our SICPA Industrial Printer also into smaller production sites and less demanding applications.

What are the challenges with these new projects, how can we deal with these challenges?

The challenge is that each project is unique. It is difficult to standardize a product, so the decision has been to focus on the core components such as the printheads, the print bars and print modules - plus the inks of course - and help the OEM Partner to integrate those components into their printer product. In some cases, when the partner doesn’t have the capability to design, develop and produce the whole printer we also offer those services, but our bandwidth is limited for those type of projects.

You seem to focus very much on your Customers needs – tell us about your ‘special relationship’ you would have with customers on a project and do you adjust your product offering to suit their needs?

Yes indeed. If the business justification exists and the customer contributes to CAPEX investments and engineering costs, we consider adapting our standard products to meet the needs of the specific project. The areas in which we are willing to invest and bear the costs is in the inks’ formulation. As inks development is one of the core values at SICPA we are interested in expanding the inks portfolio.

The drawback of the approach I mentioned before, is that the sales cycle and timeline of the projects normally takes several months, so the business return may be longer than expected or desired, but the good thing is that our customers become real partners with whom we build a long-term relationship.