good afternoon everyone oh that was actually good we're gonna try it one more time because I thought I'd get no responses good afternoon everyone all right just want to make sure everyone's awake and with me it's been a long day of a lot of good information right but sometimes the eyes can glaze over okay so as mentioned I'm going to talk today about aqueous pigment inks and some of the technology challenges for the growth areas and some of the knobs that we can turn to help find solutions for those there we go all right so DuPont who I work for right has made aqueous inks for over 25 years for a broad variety of applications you can see all the the key ones that we focus on here for today's talk I'm going to focus primarily on textile and packaging right which are our two areas that are continuing to grow and where we expect to see continued future relevance Frank jet so let's start with textiles right what's shaping where the textile industry is going well here are some of the trends shaping the fashion industry which I don't think is news to anyone right so shorter season so more of this fast fashion faster turnaround mobile commerce right so consumers now are used to being able to order something right stores want to manage their inventory but your customers still want it to show up in a very quick time frame virtual and augmented reality so if you've been keeping up with this right there are more and more innovations where you or I could now on our app or in a store kind of virtually try on and fit a garment that may or may not exist at that point at some point in the future order it and still expect to receive it in a very timely fashion right and it could potentially be custom-made for us and obviously sustainability so consumers are continuing to drive brands to make sure that they are using the more most sustainable processes there's a lot of an attention to how we're treating the environment and so all of those things in terms of that just-in-time production and desire for greener processes really drive a great fit for digital printing right in particular aqueous inks can have some benefits there and just to talk about that a little better for those that paid attention right Amazon was granted a patent that talked about kind of this automated on-demand cutting so type application and so I don't want to focus on the entire patent the one thing that I do want to focus on is a section here where it talks about the print engine so clothing is ordered right in this concept and here you have a printer that where you take plane rolls of fabric and so you're printing the garment and the desired pattern pattern right there right and so that dress in that shirt may actually be completely different designs patterns or colors it all then gets you know cut out and so in an automated process and the garment is made and so with innovations like this as we go further and further into the future what are the types of inks that could really lend itself to this sort of design in particular if you have some of these things being located in more of the industrialized areas where there's a lot of sensitivity about effluent waste streams and sustainability concerns so if you look at inks that are commonly used in digital printing for textiles and so DuPont makes all of these types of ink chemistry's let's start at the top you can see with reactive reactive and acid right these are processes that require a lot of steaming right so high energy processes heavy washing so you have a lot of chemicals going into your effluent stream you get to direct disperse the stories a little better you just have to do heat fixing on a drum but there is usually a washing step required there and then the last two if you look at sublimation right you kind of have the ideal case there where you just have to have that heat transfer process there's no additional post-processing steps but that only works on certain types of fabrics right you can't print on anything whereas if you come down to pigment as a solution you now have just the heat fixing step while some people may choose to wash it you typically do not but you can print on any sort of substrate that you desire in that case right and so all of that being said as we look at it where things are going right a quiesce pigment gives you the benefit of not having the high capital costs or energy expenses it gives you the better environmental impact right with no wastewater less hazardous chemicals and you have the flexibility to print across all fabrics and so this is really something that I think would fit well into these concepts of the future about how clothing may be made which is very different than the way it's me today so let's take a moment and look at what's going on in packaging so if we look at the packaging market right similar sorts of trends in that you've got customization and artisan brands right so these are again around smaller lot smaller runs less overall inventory so you don't need to do big production cycles shorter turnaround expectations so once again you have customers ordering things on their phone that you may not necessarily have an inventory today and they want it to be produced and delivered to them in a very timely fashion functionality right so there's lots of desire now with the ability to print things on packages where you can track them and again sustainability in a similar sense right are you working with things that are recyclable are you taking good care of the environment packaging often comes in contact with food etc are you using materials that are considered less hazard or have lower hazard profiles and so once again these shorter runs these desires for greener processes really lends itself well to digital printing and in particular aqueous ain´t chemistry's so if we dig a little bit deeper into the packaging application the way we think about it into bomp we tend to break it up into four categories which i think are fairly common even though people may give them slightly different names so corrugated in which you're printing on coated or uncoated papers right folding carton primarily coated papers almost exclusively tagging label in what you're looking at mixed-media right so you can go anywhere from what we would call plain papers to films and then flexible film which is you know all types of of different films with the added requirement of some level of food compliance whether it's indirect or direct right and so that also increases the complexity and so as a result as you move from what's gonna be to your right on this chart right you can see that the technical complexity for aqueous digital inks increases as you head towards flexible film with the additional added to food compliance and so why is that if we think about the substrates that you're printing on right if we think about kind of printing that we've been doing for a long time on on various uncoated or plane or inkjet coated papers and or textiles right you have substrates where you are printing your aqueous liquid ink and liquid has somewhere to go right when you move now into things like packaging or areas that have heavily coated papers you're talking about either low porosity or substrates with no porosity at all and now that fluid has nowhere to go you have to remove it all in a different way and also these substrates tend to be fairly hydrophobic so great we have all these different substrates to to print on you know aren't people printing on a qui on aqueous inks on plastic films today so why isn't yet so much more complicated well if we take a quick look at what's in an ink great and this is a for instance right this doesn't represent every flexo ink or every inkjet ink it's just an example but you can see with aqueous flexo inks that may be used today in more traditional analog processing on things like like flexible film your solids which are typically your pigment dispersion and your binder can can make up to fifty percent of that particular composition with viscosities that can go into the hundreds of centipoise for aqueous inkjet your solids are typically no more than about fifty fifteen percent of your composition with a much lower centipoise right so then when you look at all of the other components that are in the ink right so your clothes ovens your water your surfactants and your additives the other key thing is to pay attention to the yellow slice on the pie chart right in aqueous flexo inks you have a very low level of humectant whereas in aqueous pigment inks for inkjet we tend to have a very high level of humectant and the obvious reason for that is because as you're printing you don't want your 8 to be so fast drying that it's drying on the printhead nozzle right because then you're going to have a terrible printing performance and so typically you put a lot of humectant in there in order to have good printing but now on these non-porous substrates you need to be able to remove the and the whole point of a humectant is to drying right so you have that challenge that you then need to meet when you're looking at these non-porous substrates so formulating aqueous inks for these applications is a balancing act right you're constantly looking at and again this is not an all-inclusive list it's just a few of the key things I wanted to highlight right you're looking at really balancing your jetting reliability your print quality compatibility with your overall system and your different components of your ink right will impact each of these categories in a different way so if we look for a moment at your binder which is essentially your polymer in your formulation the more binder you have in most cases the better your print durability will be and so that's a great thing and we all love to load all the polymer in the world into every possible ink Sept of course when you get to a certain point it starts to mess with your getting reliability right and you have a hard time getting the ink and so you're always doing this dance right to basically balance these these various categories right because your binder can also have a positive or negative impact on your image quality in some cases it can affect the color in a bad way in other cases with the use of pretreatments it might do better and so what I'm gonna do on the next couple of charts is just unpack a little bit a couple of these performance categories and again write the knobs you can turn to try to help balance to deal with this balancing act so let's talk first about crimp print quality and in this category I'm kind of lumping together your image quality and your durability for the print image so again an ink is made of many things these are just a few of the ones I'm highlighting but if you think about your color or your binder which is your polymer and your surfactant let's start with color right so higher color better thing right usually customers want higher color strength better OD and a logical way to think about that is well load as much pigment as you possibly can into your ink and that is likely to give you some of the best color you can achieve well sometimes the interesting dance you get to play is if you look at this orange line on this chart right this happens to be magenta ink it this actually has the highest pigment loading for this sample so good color strength but if you see where it sits on the on this a B access it actually starts to shift over into the reddish sort of area and so the issue with that becomes you don't get you didn't get a nice pure magenta and so it turned out that actually stepping back on the pigment loading was a better thing for this particular ink formulation because it gave you a much cleaner magenta that was repeatable despite the amount of print density that you had but at the end of the day that was actually the thing that made the color look the best not just aiming for maximizing the amount of pigment right so again it's always this balancing act and understanding what affects the performance you're looking at similarly with gamut right so this is just a little image of a gamut this happens again to be a magenta but the one comment I want to prepare is you know you have a certain gamut volume and you may get requests where customers say well I want you know more in this sort of magenta region or reddish region less in the blue you may find that okay maybe you need to add a mix in another pigment or something else in order to achieve that and so you'd think well we've balanced this formulation just right we have ideal dot spread right it's pretty durable everything looks great all we're gonna do is add a little bit of a different pigment should be fine well you may find that once you do that you actually affect your dot spread which may require you to do something else around your surfactants and but again you had the ideal dot spread right so nobody wants you to touch that they just want you to fix the color just that one thing right so again it's just a little bit about the dance and the challenge that you can have and then finally here just want to talk about durability so what you're looking at here is a sample of our white ink on a film right and so basically you can see right you this was just an evolution of some of the work that we've done but you know you can achieve a good optical density with a white a white pigment ink on film but then you have the challenges right ultimately people that are looking at pigments on film ideally don't want to have to over print it and so you can play with some of the knobs like your binder selections to able to improve your overall durability so that you don't smudge or scratch it it's easily next just a few words quickly about pretreatment so I think the the great thing about working for a company that makes inks is sometimes people only want to talk about the inks and the thing that you know you learn over time is that really you're dealing with printing systems right and so system solutions are often and a very effective way to go and so in this particular case so pretreatments again you've got your polymers salts functional additives there are other things in there but those are just a few of the ones I'll highlight and I think as we saw earlier I forget whose presentation it was where they showed a sample of this right again this is some of our ink samples from the lab on film right and this is printed whoops there we go this is printed on I believe this is a PT film right you get a lot of running but then if you apply a pretreatment and in this case it's a pretreatment that we're designing that's actually matched with the inks it's being used you can do a lot in terms of your overall image quality sharpness and also durability like the white ink you saw on the previous chart similarly in textile applications pretreatment can have a massive effect and so these three samples here are all the same ink the same fabric printed under the exact same conditions really the only difference is the particular pretreatment formulations that were used and you can see very clearly right the clarity and the sharpness of the line that's printed and so if you think about that in a larger image if you were to take a step back from the magnification it's not just gonna affect your line acuity and how sharp your images but it also could give you a brighter color or what appears to be a stronger color strength because now you've got more of the ink sitting up on the fabric and of course there's print reliability so this is the last sort of performance component that I'll talk about and because apparently czar is breaking the laws of physics there oops with the on a soggy number right and they're printing outside of this printable fluid zone I won't touch that but the idea is that you know physics defined for us at one point sort of the range wear with different fluids you can get a good drop break up and sort of form ideal drops all I want to talk about is how are the things that you put in your ink affect your ability to form good drops and so in this case I'm highlighting your dispersion or your particle size of your color and your dispersion the polymer and then your some factors in humectants and so what this chart really shows with these different inks is you can have a situation where you eject a drop you form a tail and the tail breaks off and the two drops never catch up right so that's going to have a negative impact on your image quality you can form a an ideal drop right off the bat or you can form a tail that almost gives you a satellite but it actually is able to catch up with the drop before it hits the surface and the point here is that how this behaves can really be tuned in some sense by your dispersion or particle size but also even by the polymers that you're using so you could have a situation in which you have something that breaks up into a less-than-ideal drop but because of the components that are in the ink there they're actually able to catch up and form an ideal drop before hitting the substrate the only other thing I wanted to say about this and it's a little bit of a commercial is ink does not solve it all even though we would love to take credit for all of it and so the other thing is you can create an ink that gives you a pretty good drop and you actually are able to create a perfect drop if you spend a little bit of time on the waveform so that's just my commercial for system solutions right because at the end of the day the waveform is also a powerful tool and the final comment I'll make about this is just again another example of how your polymer selection can have a big impact right so this is again this happens to be a magenta ink I guess have a seam here polymer a right you can see you've got significant wetting on the nozzle plate and just by looking at a different configuration you we were able to maintain the properties but essentially you have a very clean nozzle plate with no wedding at all so I'm not gonna talk about this in depth but I do think it's important to note writes it I think you know you have a lot of NGOs out there like Wicca Tex and people that certify the inks there all of the sustainability concerns that I mentioned earlier right people are concerned about the materials that are going into their formulations so this is really thing to say that while you're solving this balancing act right sometimes your toolboxes can become very constricted because you have to be very aware of what you're using and this is particularly true when you move into the space around packaging printing and food compliance because essentially what you're looking at there is you know everything that you use has to be approved saves per the Swiss ordinance or one of those one of those requirements so hopefully you caught on to the theme as I went through my earlier charts that I kept mentioning the binder and the polymer and the different impacts that could have and the reason is because when we talk about how our eighth we astigmatism and really be appropriate for the next generation of applications a key knob is going to be your polymers right and so a strong polymer competency good polymer selections in our case we do have that internally so if it's not something we can source we can often make new materials that will do what we need them to do is important to being able to break some of these challenges that you have and so in this case if you take a look right you can this if you take a look right you can design polymers that can give you thermal functionality right so once you heat them they change binary systems so essentially it has one set of properties in the printhead when you print and then when it hits your substrate you the properties change reactive groups I think people are very familiar with with general polymers and the other thing that's really interested with polymers is that there are more and more sources as polymer innovation moves forward of the ability to bio base or bio source polymers and also a lot more work going on and how some polymers can be biodegraded and so I think as all of those things evolve around different types of polymer chemistry we're really going to be able to achieve more in this space and as a very quick example of just the general power of polymers and how you design them right this is a cartoon of basically a dispersed pigment right so you can see the dispersants all around the pigment and you can cross-linked it and in reality what that does is really help widen your formulation box rate to help you with this balancing action so at the end of the day as start to play with the vehicle in this first photo you can see that you get to a point where you destabilize your dispersion and all your pigment settles out but in the second example with the cross-linked dispersion you we were able to do a lot more in terms of the various changes we could make to the vehicle to help balance the performance properties and with that I'm at the end of my talk so once again I think aqueous pigment inks are well positioned to help address the future demands and again the formulation knobs there with the pigments the various polymers give you a lot of flexibility you can really tune the performance a lot and you can come up with options that give you good sustainability polymer competencies are key I'll keep banging that drum and I think that again the commercial for the solution of a system rate those are continuing to evolve I think ideally you have customers that will say nope we want the ink to do absolutely everything but there are ways where you can look at same with pretreatment can you either selectively place pretreatment so that you're not having to flood coat your entire substrate you also have options as I mentioned with potentially some binary systems where theoretically the ink is doing everything but it may be because you have a two component system so there are lots of innovations coming ahead and I think it's a fun area to work in and I'd love to see what happens as we move into these new spaces so thank you for your attention and happy to take any questions [Applause] you