WCA July 2018

Technology news

1,000m/min cable printing ❍ JET Rapid at work: 128,000 electrically charged ink drops fly towards the gutter every second

electricians have perfected thanks to decades of research and testing. As a result, the printer can print at a rate impossible for the human eye to see. A minute spray nozzle in the cylinder-shaped printhead, mounted above the cable, fires 128,000 electrically charged ink drops towards the gutter every second. A high voltage field between the gutter ends changes the trajectory of the individual ink drops. The drops land on the cable as pixels, and are dry in less than a second. Information such as the manufacturer name, data matrix code and graphics appear on the cable as if painted by an invisible hand. As well as black, yellow and blue, in a recent development, the JET Rapid can now even print easily readable white text on black cables, by using specially pigmented inks. Paul Leibinger GmbH & Co KG – Germany Website : www.leibinger-group.com

completely illegible. The consequences present a real challenge to many cable manufacturers: if the printer hits its limit for a mere two minutes, two kilometres of expensive cable will end in the bin. So, how can production be made more reliable? The JET Rapid is designed for high-speed labelling tasks in the wire, cable and pipe manufacturing industries, confirmed Huber+Suhner AG, a Swiss company with a global reach in the electrical and optical bonding technology industry. The printer’s automatic Sealtronic closure system also gives it reliability. The gutter is retracted and the nozzle is closed to create an airtight seal when the printer is not working. This prevents the ink from drying out and blocking the nozzle. As a result, there is no need for time-consuming cleaning. Efficiency comes from the continuous inkjet (CIJ) technology, which mathematicians, engineers and

WHEN hunting, a lion can run at speeds of more than 60km/h. Modern cable extruding machines operate at a similar pace. The problem: marking systems run the risk of creating bottlenecks in production. The solution from Paul Leibinger is JET Rapid – fast continuous inkjet (CIJ) printers that can keep up with speeds of up to 1,000m/min. Its users include cable manufacturers such as Huber+Suhner in Switzerland. As part of the cable manufacturing process, electrical or fibre optic wires shoot through extruders which coat them in a protective outer layer made of materials such as Teflon or PE. Production systems are getting faster and faster, with some of them now able to operate at up to 60km/h. These are speeds that threaten to bring the printers located downstream of the extruders to their knees. The manufacturer’s name, logo, batch number and length label become distorted and, in the worst case,

Graphics bigstockphoto.com Artist Olechowski

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Wire & Cable ASIA – July/August 2018