Caisa Johansson

Flexographic ink-coating interactions - Effects of porous structure variations of coated paperboard

Calendering of coated and uncoated paper is widely used to enhance optical properties such as gloss and print quality. The aim of this thesis is to characterize coatings and prints, and to validate models using experimental results from optical measurements of physical samples. Calendering of coated paper often leads to a brightness decrease. The mechanism for this is not altogether clear. One common explanation is that the porosity of the coating layer decreases and hence the scattering decreases. By comparing simulated and measured results it was shown that modifications of the surface properties account for the brightness decrease of ground calcium carbonate coated substrates with calendering. Monte Carlo light scattering simulations, taking into account the measured decrease of surface microroughness and increased effective refractive index, showed that surface modifications accounted for most of the observed brightness decrease of the ground calcium carbonate coated substrate, whereas the bulk scattering and absorption coefficients were not affected by calendering. It was also shown that the scattering coefficient is significantly dependent on the coat weight whereas the physical absorption coefficient is not. The penetration of ink in the z-direction of a substrate influences the quality of the print. The ink penetration affects print density, mottling and dot gain, common print effects that influence the preference of consumers. The pressure in the printing nip and the porosity of the substrate both affect the amount of ink that is pressed into the porous structure of a coating layer during printing. By printing pilot coated paperboard with different coating porosity and measuring the resulting optical properties of the prints, a basis for simulations of the different layers, that is to say the coating, the print and the mixed layer in between, was created. Results show that ink distribution is strongly affected by the roughness of the substrate. Fibres and fibre flocks underneath the two coating layers created an unevenly distributed coating thickness that affected the print quality. Differences in pore size and pore size distribution also affected the behaviour of the ink. A coating layer of broad pigment particle size distribution resulted in a relatively low print density, in comparison to coatings of narrowly distributed particle sizes. Comparison of dot gain showed that the coating layer of a narrow particle size distribution had a relatively low dot gain compared to others. In this work, these results are explained by the differences in ink distributions on and in the coating layers.