In this article, David looks at current and future state of Kodak Enterprise Inkjet Systems Division (EISD), the Stream and ULTRASTREAM Technologies as well as PROSPER products and future technologies.
In my first article on Kodak production inkjet, I took a look at its history and the broad range of products which include the VERSAMARK and PROSPER product lines. That article was written before Kodak filed for bankruptcy in 2012. When the company emerged from bankruptcy in 2013, Antonio M. Perez, the Chairman and CEO at the time, announced “We have emerged as a technology company serving imaging for business markets – including packaging, functional printing, graphic communications and professional services,…”. Fast forward to March 15, 2016, and Kodak announced that it was in talks to sell the Enterprise Inkjet Business. If this sounds confusing to you (and it should), in the conclusion to this article I will share my take on the proposed sale.
More importantly, in this article, I will focus on what the Enterprise Inkjet Systems Division (EISD) has been doing, and where it is ultimately headed. In late March, along with a small group of analysts, I had an opportunity to visit the home of EISD in Dayton Ohio to see what they were working on, and what they are planning to be showing at drupa 2016. In short, I was very impressed with what I saw, and what they have accomplished during the relatively quiet and trimmed down years of bankruptcy and reorganization. I can’t wait to see what else they will be able do when they can put all of these other Kodak corporate distractions behind them.
Beyond the PROSPER line of printheads and presses, EISD has been working quietly, and not so quietly, with a few companies to OEM its Continuous Ink Jet (CIJ) technologies. These include press manufacturers, like Timsons for its newspaper press, and Bobst for their new line of packaging presses, which includes corrugated liner, folding carton, and flexible packaging presses. However, Kodak has have also been working with other companies in the decorative and functional printing space on OEM relationships that are not ready for public announcement at this time. With its scalable ULTRASTREAM Technology printing modules for OEMs, they will support print bar widths from 8 inches to 97 inches, which opens it up to lot of potential applications. Some of these new areas include; industrial substrates, printed electronics, biomedical and 3D applications, just to mention a few.
Kodak Continuous Inkjet Imaging
While Kodak continues to sell and support the VERSAMARK piezoelectric (piezo) inkjet products, the current efforts of and future successes for EISD are really centered around the Stream CIJ technologies.
At the heart of the EISD and PROSPER technology is the CIJ print head technology. As a refresher, most of the inkjet head technologies fall into two primary categories Drop on Demand (DoD) and CIJ. In DoD, there are two main categories of technology, thermal and piezo. In a thermal printhead, a tiny heater vaporizes a thin film of ink. A vapor bubble fills the chamber like a piston to force ink through a nozzle. Air bubbles are also forced out on every drop ejection cycle. In a piezo printhead, there is a piezoelectric material in an ink-filled chamber behind each nozzle instead of a heating element. When voltage is applied, the piezoelectric crystal vibrates, which generates a pressure pulse in the fluid forcing a droplet of ink from the nozzle. Piezo inkjet enables a wider variety of inks, including UV, than thermal inkjet. Thermal ink needs to be heat resistant and non-volatile. On the other hand, the piezo print heads are more expensive to manufacture due to the use of the piezoelectric transducer.
Continuous Ink Jet (CIJ), takes a different approach. There is no start and stop of drop generation as in DoD. Instead the printhead continuously generates a flow of ink through the nozzle at a high pressure to reduce nozzle clogging. Heaters warm the surface of the fluid jet as it exits the nozzle creating a pulse that modifies the surface tension of the jet stream causing a disturbance down the jet filament and breaking the stream into droplets. The drop size is proportional to the time between ink pulses and the stream velocity, and it is easily controlled. Ink drops not used are recirculated for reuse.
