Flexo Ink, Oil vs Water, Which One Is Better?

Choosing flexo ink for your flexographic printing projects is not a decision to be taken lightly. Furthermore, you should not base ink selection solely on the cost.

How To Choose The Correct Ink Type?

You should base your decision to choose ink on several considerations, including:

• Product use
• Substrate
• Image carrier materials
• Chemical compatibility
• Surface tension
• Print speed

Furthermore, certain inks contain components that are subject to highly particular safety, storage, and handling laws. You must consider all of these when acquiring ink for your flexo print job.

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Main Flexo Ink Types

One can classify flexo inks into two types that printers use regularly in the industry:

1. Volatile Inks – Water, oil, and solvent-based inks that are set and dry by evaporation or absorption.
2. Curable Inks – UV/EB inks that set and dry when exposed to ultraviolet light or an electron beam.

For the purposes of this essay, we’ll concentrate on two of the most common volatile inks. This will help you determine whether water-based or oil-based flexo ink is best for your print project.

1- Water-Based Flexo Ink

Industry experts consider water-based inks to be the most ecologically friendly. This is due to their short ingredient list, which includes:

• A body of water
• The color pigment
• Defoamers are those who make things that don’t float.
• A small number of compounds aid in adhesion and drying.

They are also the safest inks to store.

Water-based flexo inks have a very high surface tension, often the greatest of any ink. As a result, they are suitable for printing on extremely absorbent heavyweight substrates. Such as corrugated packaging materials.

They are suitable for use with any elastomer sleeve.

2- Oil-Based Flexo Ink

Oil-based inks comprise of the following ingredients:

• Pigments – a type of color.
• Hydrocarbons – a kind of hydrocarbon.
• Liquified petroleum (often soy oil and sometimes mineral oil)
• The solvents used to combine oil-based inks are extremely corrosive.

As a result, industry experts advise handling oil-based ink with extreme caution. They also come with safety and environmental instructions for storage, cleaning, and handling.

For example, oil-based inks emit volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which contaminate the air and endanger personnel and the environment. If you use oil-based inks, you must have a VOC containment and disposal mechanism in place.

One should not utilize oil-based flexo inks with certain elastomer materials due to their components. When printing with oil-based flexo inks, hydrocarbon-resistant elastomer printers commonly require sleeves.

Oil-based inks generally attach to materials through absorption. As a result, they work best in combination with substrates such as newspaper, which is extensively utilized in the publishing business.

Other Flexo Inks

Maybe you’re not a fan of water- or oil-based inks—that’s great! There are other different flexo ink solutions available. The majority of these are environmentally friendly.

Vegetable-Based Inks

Industries generate vegetable-based inks from an organic component, such as maize oil or soybeans. And so experts intend they should minimize VOCs. Not to mention that they are easily recyclable and have a lower environmental impact after usage.

UV Curable Inks

We touched on this briefly, but it deserves a closer study. Under UV light, these inks dry almost rapidly and emit 99.5 percent fewer VOCs. Unlike typical volatile inks, UV/curable inks eliminate the need for additional coatings and protectants, as well as the requirement for further coatings and protectants.

Algae Ink

What is it? That’s correct. This ink is extremely sustainable, and it has a negative carbon footprint, which means it does more for the environment than almost any other ink discussed here. UV resistance is provided via algae ink.