How Can Manufacturing Facilities Benefit from UV LED Curing?
UV LED curing systems are ideal for the UV curing of inks in a variety of applications such as: labels and packaging, bottle printing, 3D printing, coding and marking, posters and signage, and other manufacturing processes. UV LED technology offers increased productivity, operating economics, and sustainability for these applications.
The ability to provide consistent output, even during long-lasting, high-volume jobs—when curing sensitive products—makes UV LED technology an effective solution in these manufacturing settings. For “food-safe” applications, process stability is the key to consistent, dependable low-migration printing. Phoseon’s UV LED systems ensure every packaging run receives the same consistent, uniform UV output for repeatable results.
Why is UV LED curing more effective than traditional mercury UV?
Today’s high-performance UV LED curing technology is the newest advancement in UV curing. With the features it offers today, it opens the door to new applications and new revenue opportunities with the ability to print on heat sensitive and thinner substrates, offering increased profitability for printers and end users. UV LED curing solutions offer higher print quality, faster curing speeds, and a more reliable curing process than traditional
curing methodologies. There are many advantages of UV LED curing technology in terms of capabilities, economics, and environmental benefits. Initial investment costs can have a quick payback as UV LED solutions drastically improve uptime, throughput, lower maintenance costs and allow noticeable energy savings.
The printing industry continues to challenge and drive the ink formulation/chemical material suppliers with UV LED wavelength optimized materials. At the same time, UV LED curing units have become more powerful, more efficient in delivering higher energy to the media thus driving not only environmentally clean, energy efficient solutions, but also increased throughput and process flexibility.
How does Phoseon work with manufacturers to create solutions tailored to their specific process?
Phoseon works closely with OEMs during the product design phase to determine the light source and solution requirements. Our team works with the various materials suppliers/partners to ensure they have the latest UV LED technology available to optimize their formulations, as well as working together to solve end user challenges. Working with converters for retrofit opportunities also allows us to receive first-hand feedback to further improve our light source technology, reliability, and full solution offerings.
What should manufacturers know before they start the process of adding UV LED curing systems into their manufacturing lines?
If you are in the market to invest or retrofit your press with a UV LED curing system, it is important to be an educated customer because not all UV LED technologies are created equal. It is important to understand and compare the key factors that impact how a UV LED system can increase throughput, quality, and reliability.
Printing may be an art, but it is also a science. Phoseon has engineering science on its side. Phoseon solid state UV LED light sources lead the industry in peak irradiance, highest energy density and best diode quality. These combine for a curing solution that enables clearly superior printed products, with brighter colors and better adhesion on a broader range of substrates.
Phoseon UV LED curing systems don’t just help improve your print quality, they can also help improve your bottom line. Phoseon UV LED technologies provide reliable, consistent output, enabling increased yields and more press uptime for greater throughput — in addition to saving energy and lowering maintenance costs for an overall reduced cost of ownership and quick ROI.
What is holding back manufacturers that have not yet adopted UV LED curing?
Converters have the option to either buy a new LED press, retrofit a few existing stations on their press or upgrade the entire press. Most of the time when manufacturers haven’t incorporated a UV LED solution it is mainly because they don’t fully understand all the benefits of the technology and wrongly think that the inks or coatings are not available for UV LED printing.
But when you understand all the compromises made with UV arc lamps or hybrid systems, you can see that mercury lamps or even hybrid solutions are a path to a dead end. If you want to move to UV LEDs to increase throughput and quality, there are many reasons why moving to a pure UV LED curing system makes the most sense. UV LED brings increased uptime, a wider range of material that can be used with it, the compactness of the infrastructure (no exhaust system needed) and the environmental friendliness of the solution to name just a few.
Making the move to UV LED is simple and straightforward. With thousands of printers running 100% pure UV LED curing systems, we have not seen a single press operator ask to go back to their traditional approach. Once the change is experienced, there is no reason to go back to the pain of a traditional mercury-based solution.
