Sun Chemical: Developing Inks and Defining the Future of Inkjet

One of the key benefits of greater freedom is being able to go out and meet up with people and spend time reconnecting, by listening to challenges and successes and improving on your relationships, and then your product too.

Advanced Materials Laboratory

While it was great to once again catch up with the team behind the success of the inkjet ink manufacturing, it was inspiring to see how the business operation has developed since I last visited back in 2019.

I was impressed to see that since then a whole new facility, what Sun calls the ‘Advanced Materials Laboratory’, has been built to both improve productivity and creativity for new ink development and also to add value and enrich the partner experience for customers. Added to this, is an entire office refurbishment to accompany the technical focus enabling technical and commercial people a far more conducive environment for collaboration.

As well as meeting with the commercial team, I also met Nigel Caiger, Director of Digital Technology, the man behind this new Advanced Materials Laboratory at Sun Chemical’s Midsomer Norton site in the UK and asked him some questions about it.

So, Nigel when was this new building opened and what is the thinking behind it?

“In the summer of 2021, we opened this new Advanced Materials Laboratory at Midsomer Norton as the global centre for our digital ink development. This modern 1300 sq metre building replaced a number of smaller labs with a single, focused facility with plenty of open space, over two levels.

While this facility is new, we have a long history of inkjet product development on the site going back around 40 years. And this is something we know will continue to be a key focus of the business in order to help us continue to develop compelling new ink solutions for a variety of different applications.”

What kind of inks are developed here and for what kind of technology?

“During the 1980s and early 1990s, the developments were restricted to CIJ and LCP coding & marking products and office thermal DOD inks. Later in the 1990s, the portfolio of activities diversified to include solvent and UV-curing DOD piezo as well as hot-melt inks.

In later years, aqueous developments have become a very major part of the activity here and we have an increased focus on packaging, decor and textile applications for inkjet to supplement the markets Sun Chemical is already successful such as wide-format, labels and narrow web.”

How many people work in the Advanced Materials Laboratory?

“The centre accommodates 70 multidisciplinary scientists developing products for manufacture across the various global Sun Chemical IJ manufacturing plants.

The work of the MSN Digital lab is broadly split into the following areas:

Formulation and characterisation of inks, including advanced analytical evaluation

Curing, drying and evaluation of ink film properties

Ink rheology

Advanced GCMS for migration analysis etc

Advanced microscopy for printhead evaluation

Jetting science

Free-standing printhead evaluations of inks in all major industrial printheads

Optimisation of ink through jetting studies and waveform development

Jettability and reliability evaluations using bespoke jetting assemblies

Machine Printing

Full machine printing for verification of end-user performance and print quality assessments.

The space is really modern, light and well suited to collaboration and experimentation. Both of which are integral to innovation and successful evolution.

Nigel Caiger concludes, “Customers and development partners are welcomed to the labs in order to accelerate projects through close practical collaboration which is a key feature of the way the labs are operated.”

This inspiring new space will no doubt add a further edge to the business and we look forward to seeing how the business develops in the future with this as a really valuable addition!