Ink setting and back trap mottle

Paper coating can give smoothness surface and good printability to uncoated paper. Macro roughness of base paper would be decreasing its groove and grit in view of side. Nevertheless its improving effect for paper, some kind of problem is showing in the fine coated paper. Especially, back trap mottle is one of serious problems in printing with fine coated paper. Printers can not adjust conditions to overcome the problem. Also large amounts of paper can be rejected. There are many factors that influence back trap mottle. However it is not clear what the important parameters are in back trap mottle. Back trap mottle has some relationship with ink setting but good guidelines are not clear. Back trap mottle has been linked to non-uniform ink setting. We do not know how much variation in setting we can tolerate. Other mottle issues such as micro-picking and ink refusal are still common. This paper was prepared to identify correlation with ink setting and delta ink density obtained from experiment and then tried to find out some relationships with ink setting and back trap mottle. Basically fine calcium carbonate and ciay was used for main components and coarse calcium carbonate was mixed in two fine pigments to change its porosity and ink acceptance. Micro ink tack force at KRK printing tester was adapted to measure ink setting rate. KRK units were used for back trap mottle simulation and two printed samples were prepared to check delta ink density. Clay base coating has more fast ink setting time than calcium carbonate's though smoothness of clay was better than calcium carbonate. It could be explained by that clay has finer pore in its coating than calcium carbonate. DID(delta ink density) has shown a good correlation with ink setting time from micro ink tack. The total pore volume of coating layer did not match with ink setting and DID. From the results we might conclude coating that has fine pore size around 0.05 ${\mu}m$ can be exposed to high possibility of back trap mottle.