Printing cap system with led uv drying system with improved efficiency and quality
World production for wine and spirits bottle caps is supported by a niche market focused on the manufacturing of offset printing machines for the cylindrical shapes of these items. Due to the intrinsic characteristic of this shape, two independent machines are required, one for the side of the cap, and a different one for the tops. Despite the adoption of UV curable inks around 30 years ago by the offset printing technology in general, this has not been possible for the offset printing machines for the sides of the caps because the plastic deformations produced in the side edging would lead to paint breaking during UV varnish. As a consequence, the total of the caps side globally are printed in ancient solvent-based inks printers, requiring cumbersome conventional ovens for the drying process, with 9 times higher energetic consumption than required by conventional UV technology. In addition, about 20% of caps printed do not reach it final use due to wastage because of read failures, off-centering, tolerances and precision issues.   Our project, called Print4Caps, is a new revolutionary off set caps printing machine specific for tops that uses LED UV inks and is built with contained LED UV lamps system to dry the ink. This delivers high quality finishes with centered images with 0.1mm precision. Print4Caps allows the change standard procedures (large ovens or UV ink systems). All in all, we accomplish reducing 90% carbon footprint of the process, avoiding 95% VOC emissions, minimising machine dimensions down to a 10%, increasing productivity by 3 times (30,000 pieces / hour) and decrease the caps waste by 20%. Above all, quality would improve dramatically, reducing off-center error to 0.1 mm (20% of state of the art). All in all, we intend to launch the product in 2021, achieving accumulated profits worth 5.1 M€, a ROI of almost .08 and creating 9 new jobs all within 5 years.