From the Sector

At ITMA 2023 in Milan from June 8-14, BTMA member VeriVide will introduce UltraView – its first all-LED light booth for achieving a new level of consistent and standardised colour assessment.

The company’s light booths and lighting cabinets are specified by major global retailers around the world, who rely on them for establishing and maintaining visual quality standards across their supply chains.

This is no easy feat, given the textile industry’s complex structure and the many process stages each individual garment undertakes from the designer’s desk to the finished garment on the retail shelf – often criss-crossing several continents during the journey.

Benefits
UltraView brings a range of sustainable new benefits to designers, mills and brands, and combined with VeriVide’s successful DigiEye system for non-contact colour measurement and digital imaging, can have a positive impact on a company’s bottom line, bringing savings in time, money and CO₂ emissions.

The new all-LED light booth meets all relevant international lighting and colour assessment standards. The UltraView incorporates the company’s A rated CIE D65 and CIE D50 artificial daylight light sources and includes multiple pre-set point of sale light sources while being fully tuneable for recalibration to the individual requirements of each customer. In the past, individual light booths have had to be dedicated to the stipulated settings of each specific customer’s switch sets. The rapid flexibility of UltraView, however, makes the need for multiple light booths a thing of the past.

It also eliminates the need for the regular bulb changes that were necessary with fluorescents, to provide significant energy savings.

As supply chains continue to move towards digitisation away from time-consuming and expensive physical sampling, a version of the UltraView, VisionView, is available with an internal monitor to enable physical samples to be compared with their digital versions, if required.

DigiEye
For non-contact colour measurement and digital imaging, VeriVide’s DigiEye collects and processes data that can be communicated and shared instantly, enabling manufacturers, producers and processors to speed up quality control, sustain product integrity and reduce waste.

DigiEye also overcomes the limitations of spectrophotometers, which are limited to products with a solid colour appearance and can only measure ‘average’ colour, assessing the limited area of the product exposed in the instrument’s aperture.

These limitations are further compounded if the product has any form of multi-coloured characteristics or appearance, an uneven or inconsistent surface, a colour area too small to be captured by the instrument or any sort of surface effect, such as carpet pile and the sheen of satin and silk.

RecyOuest, France, has successfully started up the world's first recycling line for agricultural plastic waste nets at its mill in Argentan. The innovative recycling line featuring a unique dry-cleaning system was delivered, installed and commissioned by the international technology group ANDRITZ in August 2022.

RecyOuest, based in Argentan, France, is a green economy company that handles the recycling contaminated filamentary thermoplastics such as round bale nets and twines. With its recycling process, RecyOuest is part of a circular economy approach.

The ANDRITZ recycling line can process up to 8,000 tons of waste and produce recycling fibers for nonwoven applications and also for pellets made of waste from agricultural single-use plastic nets and twines. These pellets are then returned to the plastics industry by mixing both recycled and virgin raw materials, thus reducing the amount of virgin plastic used.

This line, inspired by the techniques from textile wastes recycling, is equipped with a unique mechanical dry-cleaning system that allows resource savings by avoiding the use of water and chemicals. This state-of-the-art ANDRITZ equipment allows RecyOuest to produce recycling fibers for nonwoven applications and also pellets for ever new eco-designed nets and twines for the agricultural sector, with the lowest possible environmental impact.

Maruti Printing transformed its business as the first printer in India to adopt the latest LED-UV curing technology from AMS Spectral UV, a Baldwin Technology Company. The hybrid system, which includes traditional UV modules, has been in production for nearly two years and has significantly expanded the offset printer’s capabilities for its customers, including adding the ability to print on all types of plastic substrates.

Not only does Maruti have the distinction of being an LED-UV trailblazer in India, but it also is first in the market to upgrade a high-speed, high-performance Heidelberg Speed Master 72F+L six-color printer with coating tower—which prints up to 15,000 sheets per hour—with AMS Spectral UV’s high-power AMS XP9-I Series LED-UV and P3 Smart UV curing modules.

Established in 1986 and headquartered in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, Maruti serves customers throughout India, providing offset printing of scratch cards, banners, booklets, brochures, calendars, danglers, pamphlets, posters, stickers and envelopes.

In January 2020, Maruti took delivery of two AMS XP9-I Series LED-UV modules to cure colors in the interdecks. The modules are ideal for the highest-speed curing situations that require consistent peak intensity to the substrate, which is the case for Maruti’s offset printing standard of perfection with every cure.

To cure ink, as well as a growing variety of LED coatings, Baldwin’s AMS Spectral UV modules can be located after print units, or in the press delivery after the coater. When inks and coatings are cured with LED-UV, they become instantly dry via photopolymerization, allowing for printing on any substrate, including plastics and metallized stocks. Plus, work can be immediately finished and sent to the bindery once it comes off the press, without the need for heat, spray powder or drying time.

In addition, Maruti took delivery of two P3 Smart UV curing modules for installation at the end of the press to cure any type of UV coating and expand the company’s scope of coating compatibility to general UV coatings in order to offer its customers the widest range of UV printed choices in the Indian market.

The P3 Smart UV housings are completely liquid-cooled to ensure safe, consistent performance and increased uptime, and modules feature a universal design, so that any unit can fit any print unit location. P3 modules can be changed, inspected and cleaned quickly and easily, without tools, and lamps slide and lock into place smoothly and securely.

The durability of the equipment and its chipset was a critical deciding factor in India’s climate. The latest-generation power-and-control cabinets are dust- and moisture-resistant, allowing them to withstand extreme heat and humidity, as well as powder and airborne contaminants, making the equipment ideal for operation in stressful conditions anywhere in the world. AMS Spectral UV’s latest generation of LED chips, designed for the highest-intensity curing applications, enable the curing of LED inks and coatings at record-setting speeds. They are built with resilient components, and the semi-conductor components are sealed, which allows the chips to work in a variety of rugged environments. Additionally, integrated circuits incorporated into the design electronically protect the LEDs and the entire system.