Inkjet Marking

Overview

Inkjet printing creates a printed mark by propelling droplets of ink onto paper, plastic, glass, metal and other substrates.

Pryor’s Inkjet solution uses the continuous inkjet (CIJ) method, in which a high pressure pump directs a continuous stream of ink droplets that are deflected by electrostatic forces to print on the substrate. In this printing method, the ink droplets have a very high velocity which allows a relatively large distance between the print head and the part being marked. It is also a very high speed method due to the high drop ejection frequency.

Inkjet is commonly used on painted components, such as painted shafts in aerospace, as printed ink creates a high-contrast mark that is usually easily read by machine vision cameras. Inkjet is often used in this way alongside dot-peened Data Matrix codes as a secondary internal tracking process. It is also commonly used in the early stages of manufacture to support the initial build configuration. It is then sometimes replaced by a permanent indented mark later on in the manufacturing process for lifecycle traceability.

Pryor’s all-in-one system is optimised for marking components of various shapes and sizes. The printing head is mounted on a height adjustable column, enabling marking of taller components. For very large parts, the print head can be loaded into a marking gun, which the operator will simply hold over the area to be marked. One Inkjet marking station can satisfy the marking requirements of all of your components.

The part is mounted on an x axis sliding table, controlled by the operator. The x axis table sits on rollers that identify the position of the component relative to the ink spray and the mark being created. This ensures a high quality mark regardless of the speed by which the operator moves the component under the marking head. It also enables very long marks to be created, sometimes necessary for long serial numbers, 1D barcodes and text.

The character height is also adjustable. For very small marks, the character height can be as small as 0.7mm. This is often most suited to manufacturing and electronics data matrix marking applications. For packaging requirements, larger marks are sometimes required and the inkjet is capable of marking up to a character height of 18.2mm (on a twin-jet machine).