Want to brush up your analytical capabilities for inks?
At the beginning of the year, it’s not uncommon for people to plan for the year ahead and that can include thinking about how you want to advance your own skills. There’s always more to learn, and what better way to learn than in a group with people from a range of different companies or research centers, tasked with talking the same materials issues that you have.
You might be asking, how do you study the properties of your material, what are the requirements for an error-free measurement and how do you understand the data? And on top of that, how great would it be if the meeting was focussed on your particular materials. Well, if your business is in inks for inkjets, you are in luck.
At Malvern Panalytical we are proud to be contributing again to the IMI Europe Inkjets practical course in Cambridge 17-20 April 2023. It’s a place where you take part in hands-on demonstrations of analytical measurements of inkjet inks and can focus the measurements on your own sample requirements. Together with our peer companies in characterization solutions, we will be showcasing our Mastersizer 3000 and Zetasizer products and demonstrating all types of measurements from pigment particle size to formulation stability. So take a look and see if it is for you!
A bit of background
Have you gone paperless, and does your printer spend most of its time gathering dust in the corner? Even though the worldwide use of inks for traditional print media (including newspapers) is shrinking, more and more printing inks are being used in packaging. Inks are also used for printing textiles and electronic inks are continuously being developed for a variety of ‘smart’ and ‘flexible’ electronics applications.
The history of inks goes back over four millennia and evidence for the ancient use of soot-based inks has been found in China and Egypt. The chemistry of inks continues to go through changes – originally based on soot powders suspended in animal fats or plant oils, people explored different pigment powders and liquids and gels derived from minerals and plants. Then we went discovered oil and went through a synthetic phase, deriving many interesting properties from synthetic organic chemicals. Now the emphasis is on sustainability and using chemicals that are not derived from fossil fuels, reverting to a more sophisticated exploration of mineral and plant-derived options.
The manufacturing processes for inks never stand still and neither do the techniques used to characterize them.
Further reading