Viscosity of inkjet inks with m-VROC® and microVISC™:
Digital printing technology has motivated a rapid growth of the inks industry. The increasing demand for inkjet inks has resulted in faster production and more stringent quality control requirements. To meet the market demands, efficient, fast, and highly accurate and fast characterization methods are required.
Two main physical properties determine print quality – surface tension and viscosity. These two factors play a key role in droplet formation as well as the uniformity of the resulting printout. Ink viscosity depends on the ink formulation (pigments, resins, binders…), temperature, and in some cases, the shear rate specific of the inkjetting process.
At the same time, inks often present low viscosity values (<10 cP). This results in flow instabilities when trying to achieve high shear rate measurements of viscosity with conventional rheometers and viscometers.
VROC® powered instruments, m-VROC® and microVISC™, provide a solution to the challenges of conventional viscometer technologies. By utilizing the combination of a capillary and MEMS device, VROC®’s superior technology enables fast and accurate characterization of inkjet inks, ceramic inks, water based inks and biopolymer based inks. The high accuracy and repeatability over a wide range of shear rates make our systems Simply Precise™ with ease!