• Journal of the Korean Ceramic Society
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• v.50 no.6
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• pp.498-503
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• 2013

Over the past decade, the feasibility of using ink-jet printing for the decoration of porcelain tiles has been explored, and significant advances have been made regarding the technologies underlying printing system and materials. An ink-jet printing system for porcelain tiles has many advantages compared with a conventional printing system, including the following: (1) it is a digital process; (2) it uses non-contact printing; (3) it allows random image generation; (4) it is a highly efficient process (reduced production cost); (5) it offers massive and continuous production; and (6) it uses inorganic pigment colorants. For these reasons, ink-jet printing systems for porcelain tiles have been commercialized and are at present rapidly spreading toceramics-leading countries such as Spain, Italy, China and Japan. We also developed a proprietary system involving a piezo-electric drop-on-demand method and an ink-circulation step. The resolution of this system is greater than 360 dpi after a heat treatment and the maximum printable width is 600 mm, even when setting the printing head unit with four digital colors (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black). In addition, we systematically developed ceramic colorant-containing inks and tile-printing technology applicable to our ink-jet printing system.

• Korean Journal of Materials Research
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• v.27 no.2
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• pp.82-88
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• 2017

Ink-jet printing techniques with ceramic ink, which contains ceramic pigments as colorant, are in increasingly use in the ceramic industry. Generally, ceramic pigments that are produced by conventional method show diameters of several micrometers; these micrometer sized particles in the ink-jet printing process can cause undesirable behavior such as print head nozzle clogging. To prevent this problem, a particle size reduction process is required. In this study, CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) pigments were synthesized via solid state method. Each pigment particle was milled to submicron size by an attrition mill. The effects of micronizing on the morphology, mechanical property, crystal structure and color property of the CMYK ceramic pigments were investigated by field emission scanning electron microscopy (FE-SEM), particle size analysis (PSA), X-ray diffraction (XRD) and CIE $L^{\ast}a^{\ast}b^{\ast}$.