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Integration Technology, one of the world’s largest suppliers of UV lamp sources to the inkjet printing market, has been appointed as the worldwide distributor of a new UV curing system developed in conjunction with CoolLED.
The BA3200 is a liquid cooled system, designed specifically for inkjet printing and large surface curing using a light source which is a high density array of LEDs that are die and wire bonded to a custom-designed CoolLED substrate. The system generates a flood of high intensity, single-peak wavelength UV light for the curing of inks and is available to suit printhead arrays from 20 to 200mm.
The LED arrays are built into a narrow extruded alloy housing that can easily be fitted between or alongside the print heads with liquid cooling to ensure accurate output stability. Generating in excess of 1W/cm2 at 395nm, these units offer unrivalled intensity and cure efficiency.
A heat exchanger can be supplied capable of cooling one or several LED arrays and each LED unit comes complete with an individual electronic drive card offering totally variable intensity control and temperature monitoring.
All ancillary components can be packaged in a PC sized enclosure complete with operator controls as either a development or production tool or alternatively supplied as unit parts for integration into the host platform.
For ’pinning’ applications the BA3200 can initiate a photochemical reaction with a degree of precision not possible with bulb technology.
The system can be switched on and off instantaneously with zero warm up time and, in contrast to the comparatively short life of bulb light sources, the life of the LED light source is in excess of 10,000 hours.
John Boston, managing director of CoolLED, says they anticipate that this new technology will make a major impact and be a significant advancement in the inkjet printing industry.
“We are convinced that the highly repeatable, consistent and long-life light source produced by LEDs, plus the safety and ecological advantages they have over conventional lamp sources, means that this type of product represents the future of curing in the inkjet printing and other applications.
“We have appointed Integration Technology as the world wide distributor of this product for the inkjet market because the company is an acknowledged leader in this field.”
Adrian Lockwood, joint managing director of Integration Technology adds: “We have been looking at LEDs since 2002 and we think the CoolLED solution is the best available in the marketplace by a long way. We believe there is a great future in the use of LEDs to provide the light source for the curing process in inkjet printers.”
