From March 2019 on, Multivac Marking & Inspection (Enger, Germany) will offer a thermal inkjet printer (TIJ) to accompany its TTO printers. It can be used in direct web printers as well as in label dispensers.
In the thermal inkjet process, water is heated in the ink, forming tiny bubbles that seem to explode. The ink droplets are then expelled by the nozzle. In contrast to continuous inkjet printers, TIJ printers use cartridges with integrated print heads. The heads can be easily and quickly changed and are very low-maintenance because they require no regular cleaning. Another advantage is that the cartridges do not dry out. TIJ printers can print with resolutions of up to 600 dpi and can also print small, compact bar codes with great precision.
Depending on the carrier material, the inks are smudge-proof within one to three seconds. TIJ printers allow cascading operation of up to four adjacent print heads. Each print head has a printing width of 12.7 mm for a total print width of 50.8 mm.
In addition to the use in direct web printers with traversing axes or stationary setup at the infeed/outfeed of a packaging machine, TIJ printers can also be integrated in any label dispenser. They are mounted directly at the dispensing edge, which even allows printing of batch sizes of 1, because there are no pre-printed labels to deal with during a layout change. The new model is optionally available in protection class IP 65 as well as with a zero-downtime mode that operates with two print heads.
Operators of this labeling solution also benefit from automatic print layout administration with the Multivac HMI operating terminal. Retrieving the respective product recipe automatically loads the correct print layout. This prevents operator errors from the outset.