Industrial + Specialty Printing

This article describes the differences between specialty and conventional materials and discusses the roles these materials play in printed electronics.

By James R. Williams

Global projections from a cross section of major industrial segments (automotive, consumer, aerospace, government pharmaceutical, textile, etc.) indicate that the 21st century will present widespread opportunities for industrial printing with innovations in printable electronics—also known as organic electronics. This glowing future includes applications in solar energy, medical sensors, smart labels, new generations of miniaturized computers, media players, smart phones, and even virtual battlefield weaponry. The list seems endless.

In addition to futuristic applications, these technologies are already in use in medical, military, outdoor displays, flatscreen televisions, and solar applications, among others—each with enormous potential for sustained growth. The majority of these futuristic applications will be manufactured by printing on plastic films, dramatically changing the manufacturing landscape for capital intensive and cumbersome silicon-chip foundries, and electronics contract manufacturing as we know it (three or four orders of magnitude less expensive).

This promise of the future will use enhancements of today’s printing technologies, with different inks, printing-process controls, and printable substrates—enhancements that increase reproducibility and print-quality reliability, while lowering cost and ultimate size of the final products. Specifically, this widening use will require highly specialized substrates. There are dozens of such substrates commercially available today, with tongue-twisting chemical names, such as polybenzimadazole, polyimide, polyetherimide, polyetheretherketone, polyethylene naphthenate, and so on. Not surprisingly, each of these materials has acquired acronyms, such as PBI, PI, PEI, PEEK, and PEN, respectively. So what are the differences between these exotic materials, and which characteristics create differences in performance, cost, and other factors?

What are specialty substrates?
In my opinion, a specialty substrate is one that a printer is unfamiliar with, based on its performance characteristics and associated costs in the field and on press. Moreover, many label producers try to avoid so-called specialty substrates, because they have stereotyped them as too expensive.

When customers require specific performance characteristics that are not available with conventional, less expensive materials, the customer will pay for that value-based product because of performance, not a product at commoditized prices. The business model is as different as are the performance characteristics.