Water Penetration Dynamics and Flexo Printability of Linerboard

It is extremely important for the corrugated box industry to increase and predict flexo print quality of linerboard. There is a lack of tools able to predict flexo print quality on the basis of measurement of physical or physico-chemical properties of linerboard. For example, the roughness of the substrate does not always correlate with the print quality. The reason for this may be different sheet formation with different paper machines, resulting in different ink penetration behavior. One of the best predictors of print quality up to now seems to be the dynamic contact angle measurement that has already proven itself to be a useful tool for predicting bar code readability. The work presented herein demonstrates a correlation between water penetration characteristics as measured by ultrasonic device EMTEC-PDA and printability of flexo printed linerboard using water-based ink.