The Shape of Things to Come: Xaar and the Rise of Functional Inkjet

In this article, inspired by a podcast interview with Justin Noble of Xaar we discover how inkjet is playing a growing role in functional printing. Listen to the podcast interview here.

Industrial inkjet has always promised more than merely eye-catching point of sale graphics. The real industrial opportunity lies in factories, not retail: in coating batteries rather than brochures, in labelling vaccines rather than vinyl. Few companies illustrate that shift better than Xaar. Once synonymous with wide-format graphics, the Cambridge based manufacturer has spent the past decade turning its printheads into tools for production lines. As Justin Noble, Director of Sales, tells it, Xaar’s recent history is a study in hard lessons, useful scars and a clearer strategy for where digital deposition creates genuine value.

From clean rooms to commercial leadership

After a product development degree at the University of Portsmouth, he cut his teeth in aerospace and fibre optics before joining Xaar as a young mechanical engineer. Opening a printhead, he recalls, is to find an intricate combination of disciplines: precision mechanics, electronics, fluid dynamics, thermodynamics. He spent five to six years in R&D bringing new heads to life, then moved across operations, applications and product management. That ‘DIY graduate scheme’ yielded a rare combination: credible technical literacy aligned to market reality. It also gave him a front-row seat as Xaar’s centre of gravity shifted from graphics to industry.

Ceramics: the conversion that proved the point

When Noble arrived in 2012, the ceramics sector was on a steep incline of inkjet adoption. Within 18 to 24 months, the tile industry vaulted from almost zero digital to near total conversion. For Xaar, it was both a validation and a warning. Validation, because single-pass inkjet at industrial speed can transform a sector when the fit is right. Warning, because building a business around one fast-converting market concentrates risk. Saturation arrived as swiftly as growth. Competitors inevitably joined the revolution. New machine demand slowed. The lesson stuck: diversify applications that share Xaar’s core strengths, and ensure growth curves overlap rather than spike.

Thin-film ambitions and a strategic reset

In the mid-2010s, Xaar focused on thin-film MEMS head development in order to unlock native aqueous capability and higher resolutions. Technically it worked. Commercially it did not. Silicon foundries are expensive, volume economics are unforgiving, and rivals with vast consumer print fleets could amortise costs that an independent industrial inkjet head manufacturer could not. Xaar eventually shut down the programme, retained the IP and redirected the know-how into its bulk piezo platform. Painful, yes, but clarifying. The company refocused on what it can uniquely do: build rugged, high-performance industrial heads that push viscosity, reliability and uptime for processes where contact methods struggle.

High viscosity as an industrial door-opener

Ask Noble what excites him now and the answer is not another CMYK press. It is high-viscosity jetting as a way to move inkjet into processes it never touched. Consider corrugated. In trials with partners, Xaar has shown that thicker fluids can halve laydown and let converters print on cheaper stocks by controlling absorption. The same physics hints at new value in UV graphics, décor and other applications where less fluid with better film formation is commercial common sense.

More interesting still is what lies beyond print. High-viscosity jetting turns inkjet which is better known as a graphic printing tool into an industrial fluid deposition tool. Adhesives. Waxes. Functional coatings. Fluids that today are sprayed, slot-die coated or screened can, in specific steps, be placed digitally with precision and without masks. That matters when a small pattern change at scale equals real money. It also changes lines: from continuous apply-everything to selective ‘only apply-what-is needed’.

Printed electronics and energy: digital where it counts

Xaar’s gaze is fixed on printed electronics and energy systems where deposition is the bottleneck. Perovskite solar stacks and their fragile process windows. Semiconductor photoresists and steps that still look like a chemistry set. EV batteries wrapped in films that trap bubbles and complicate recycling. None of these are traditional “print” jobs, yet all need patterned layers placed accurately and repeatably on imperfect surfaces.

Here, hybrid is the operative word. Noble is refreshingly pragmatic: analogue processes are not going away. Slot-die and screen remain unbeatable for thick, particle-rich layers. The trick is to mix methods. Spray or slot-die the bulk. Use inkjet to add or omit what matters. Do not coat battery terminals. Do print dielectric exactly where it should be. Do not spin-coat everything if a digital step selectively does the job with less waste and easier changeovers.

The same logic is already familiar in labels where digital varnish and embellishment sit on a flexo backbone. Hybrid is not a marketing buzzword. It is how you add value without fighting physics.

Partnerships as operating system

Industrial inkjet is a collaborative team sport. Heads, fluids, electronics, transports, curing, data. Each layer has failure modes and trade-offs. Xaar’s partnerships reflect that reality. The company works with formulators and integrators to co-design heads and fluids as a single system. It also leans into the research ecosystem through partnerships such as with Added Scientific, a spin out start up from Nottingham University, seeding techniques that migrate from lab benches to factory floors. FuturePrint Industrial Print in Munich showcase will underline this breadth: photoresist steps for wafer processes, dielectric coatings for EV cells, and high-viscosity examples in décor and corrugated to connect cutting-edge R&D with near-term production wins.

What manufacturers should actually do now

Three practical takeaways emerge from Xaar’s arc.

Start with the step, not the press. Map the process and target the step where digital selectivity creates disproportionate value: less masking, fewer variants, shorter changeovers, cleaner EHS profile. It may be a millimetre-wide stripe that unlocks a million-pound saving.

Design for hybrid from day one. Assume analogue stays for what it does best. Bring digital in where it is uniquely strong: variable data, skip-coat patterns, surface-specific placement. Resist the urge to “go all digital” if the process does not need it.

Choose partners who will say no. Lab proofs are cheap. Production mistakes are not. The best collaborators know when chemistry, rheology or substrate behaviour argue against a digital step and will help you redirect the brief rather than force a misfit.

A broader, steadier future

If ceramics was Xaar’s ‘big bang’, the next decade looks more distributed. Think many medium-sized wins instead of one impressive sounding moonshot. Think deployment into messy, valuable niches where jetting the right fluid in the right place changes the economics of a line. Think graphics knowledge repurposed for factories of people that rarely visit generalized trade fairs.

Noble’s career mirrors that shift: from clean rooms to customers, from printheads as components to deposition as capability. The message is simple. Inkjet’s second act will not be driven by dazzling prints. It will be powered by practical engineering and useful precision. When combined with analogue methods and delivered through real partnerships, that precision is enough to bend costs, compress timelines and open markets that were previously closed to digital.

In short, the frontier for inkjet is not where the posters are. It is where the process is. And for Xaar, that is exactly the point.