Boundary Element Modelling of Printing and Coating Nips in a Sliding Contact.

Printing and coating nip contacts are one of the most generic and difficult areas to model successfully. A boundary element numerical model is described, which has been applied to a sliding nip contact. It models the interaction between the soft elastomer covering on the roller and the coating / printing fluid. This is a continuation of earlier work [1] and represents contacts commonly found in the printing and coating industry. A parametric investigation is used to evaluate different processes and configurations. The results highlight the main roller train design and operating parameters for ink transfer in nip contacts. An orthogonal array technique has been successfully applied to the numerical simulation of the nip contact to optimise the output from the model.