Heric says inkjet will offer print beyond print opportunities for printers that want to bring their expertise to new applications.
I have long been a proponent of the now ubiquitous technology that has become ink-jet printing. It was the first poor man’s laser printer, but also the first consumer-level device capable of full-color, high-resolution printing, in the home. That rant aside, (and I have a long rant about it floating around the archives of AP there somewhere years back) I think it is high-time to revisit ink-jet as an engine for production that a print professional may have overlooked, and I it feel is one of the most growth-oriented aspects of professional print.Sure, it is wonderful to be able to get magazine-quality or superior imagery at the press of a keystroke, and walk two metres to pick up the print. Ink-jet printing has made that a reality for nearly every modern computer user, ushering in the true distribute-then-print potential, even if today is an ill-utilised delivery method. But I feel it is time to take ink-jet on in a different mindset, one that involves printing objects or components, rather than printing on or for an object or component. Ink-jet is not just for proofing anymore, it is for manufacturing.
To set the stage for that level of thinking is so far outside the box that you are looking for a bag instead. We need to look at what an ink-jet device really is. It is a machine to facilitate the exact deposition of material onto a substrate, with high-repeatability, and extreme precision. Sounds like a lot of printers I know, and it sounds like a recipe for printing a lot more than process colourant inks.
Think about it; printing conductive-ink or dye, photovoltaic materials, adhesives, rapid-prototyping, all of it lends itself to using a device that might resemble a traditional ink-jet device, but being used to manufacture printed circuit-boards, OLEP/OLED (Organic Light-Emitting Polymer or Diode… think of them as printed LEDs) displays and active illumination panels, all potential uses for printing electronics and manufacturing. Solar cells alone, due to the emergence of new materials that utilise sub-microscopic-sized particles of carbon-nanotubes in slurry, can be ink-jetted onto a substrate for the manufacture of amorphous solar cells. This new emergent technology requires printing expertise. These ink-jet devices are microscopically positioning liquidmaterials, with the end result being an RFID antenna, a solar cell, an electro-luminescent display, or a circuit board. Replace a few words in that sentence with ink, register, or proof, and you have the current analogue to our world. Ink-jet proofing. An array of solar cells 100 or 150 centimetres wide all printed in one-fell-swoop.
The bottom line is this: this is an emergent technology. A new industry will be built upon using devices such as this to manufacture components, and it will require expertise and experience that nearly everyone in the readership of Australian Printer could bring to the table. Just because we have not looked at the printing arts going beyond a carton, package, book, or magazine, does not mean we are not capable of delivering print expertise in this new, very ecological method of manu-facturing electronic devices.
This is not futuristic Star Trek replicator technology, this is reality today, and people are doing it today. The fascinating thing about this potential, is that it could indeed be used much like a replicator, where one device can be used to manufacture designs. (ie: PDF files of vector circuit-boards, a veritable blueprint for a new component.) What I find interesting about it, is that the people doing it today are typically scientists first, and printers second. The people doing this today are one step from the laboratory, and they need print-professional help. We whom are accustomed to a modern printery, know that very high-quality print can come from a much more mundane, and nuts-and-bolts print operation. In reality, the requirements to do high-quality ink-jet manufacturing would likely be a middle-ground solution, more akin to a clean-room in the print shop, where perhaps simple solar-cell production, or simple segmented displays for example might be easily attained. We have reached a point where a professionally maintained and run device, could meet the needs of this potential new market, and a crossover in ability garnered from our industry’s experience in print and proofing can be brought to bear on it.
A simple Google search for ink jet manufacturing gave me heaps of links that brought ideas flowing to me about how that could be done, in many of the print facilities I visit on a daily or weekly basis. Their re-quirements for printable electronics are much less stringent than their traditional clean room manufacturing pro-cedures for micro-chips, and our growing abilities as far as materials, repeatability, resolution, and the like, are nearing a point of convergence.
Walk before sprint…
IT is important to realise that I am not talking about printing the next Intel or AMD microprocessor here, I am talking about simple printed circuit boards of conductive traces (the kind in remote-controls), keypads, and solar-cells. These more mundane circuits and traces require simple complexity, and have wider margin of error and tolerance than a typical ink-jet proof that our industry has been accustomed to providing. These circuits are also still produced with traditional lead/tin baths, and many nasty chemicals, by the million every year.
This requires a different mindset than traditional print. The result might have to be baked with UV light or an IR oven to make the electronic traces conduct, you might be using mylar or glass as a substrate rather than paper, and you might be look-ing at some of the craziest colour separa-tions, and inks you have ever likely seen. You may also see that this provides op-portunities to supplant other market-shifts, and to provide that diversification wedge that many investors are interested in.
I will be interested to see if there are vendor offerings at drupa that might focus on this esoteric segment of the print arts, and if there is a true and legitimate synergy between the printer, and the laboratory in the emergent industry of printed electronics. Solar cells alone, offer to me an ecological and economical reason to explore what it might take to ramp up small-scale manufacturing. Most importantly however, look at the expertise we have as print professionals having value to much more than the Sunday periodical print or folding carton industries, but to be able to provide services beyond traditional print assets. It is outside of our industry, but I still say it need not be so.
