Application Of Thermal Transfer Printing On Glass Bottles

Thermal transfer film is a technical method of printing patterns and glue on a heat-resistant film, and adhering the pattern (ink layer) and glue layer to the glass bottle by heat and pressure. This process is mostly used on plastic and paper, and less on glass bottles.

Process flow: 1. Color draft; 2. Film printing; 3. Thermal transfer; 4. Baking.

The thermal transfer film is generally divided into five layers, the surface PET film layer is used as the carrier, and the separation layer is suitable for falling off when heated. The protective layer plays the role of protecting the ink layer, the ink layer is pattern printing, and the adhesive layer is the adhesion layer.

Since the multi-color pattern can be drawn at one time in the film printing stage, during the transfer operation on the glass bottle, the existing pattern can be transferred to the glass bottle at one time. Compared with the cumbersome set of multi-color screen printing, it can greatly shorten the work of the printing case and reduce the loss of materials caused by printing errors. Nowadays, labor costs are rising, and customers have high-quality requirements for accurate positioning, so the advantages of thermal transfer printing are very obvious on multi-color manuscripts.

In addition, in the film printing stage, CMYK printing is traditionally used, and spot color printing can also be carried out according to customer requirements. The effect of thermal transfer printing is more realistic, the color reproduction is high, and gradient colors can be realized. Due to the heat and baking of the image, the color of the finished image will be firmer than that of water transfer, and it is not easy to fade. It has good properties such as corrosion resistance, aging resistance, wear resistance, and high temperature resistance.

Compared with water transfer printing and silk screen printing, thermal transfer printing has obvious advantages in glass bottle processing.

In general, compared with traditional water transfer printing and silk screen printing, the advantages of thermal transfer printing are: less labor consumption, high degree of automation, fast, accurate color registration, high yield, and less environmental pollution. However, the disadvantage of thermal transfer printing is that the standardization of the substrate is relatively high, and it needs to be operated in a relatively regular position. It is advantageous to process square and cylindrical bottles. The special-shaped bottle needs to be analyzed according to the entity to confirm the processable position. In the development of thermal transfer printing, in addition to ordinary toner inks, many new types have also been developed, such as pearlescent ink film and mirror ink thermal transfer film, and thermal transfer film with bronzing. Going forward, the use of thermal transfer on glass bottles will be more widespread.