Outstanding electronic ink (1)

First, the development of ink

In the printing industry, the status of ink is self-evident. The presentation of text and images relies entirely on the use of ink and printing materials. Colorful packaging, eye-catching outdoor advertising, colorful books, these are inseparable from the credit of ink. Different kinds of printing processes have different requirements on the nature of the ink, which makes the type of ink continuously refined. At the same time, with the development of the printing industry, ink has not only been used to present graphics, it also has anti-counterfeiting, decoration and other effects. A variety of inks with special processes continue to emerge, making the ink family more and more large, and its members also have their own characteristics. In recent years, there has been a type of electronic ink that has been quietly appearing in the ink industry, and has attracted people's attention with its unique personality and will have a certain impact on the way humans obtain visual information.

Second, the technical advantages of electronic ink

1. The emergence of the cause network once brought a big impact on traditional books and newspapers. On the Internet, we can read news, read novels, and browse a variety of information, and can be based on personal preferences. With a selective look, the degree of convenience is self-evident. Some people had worried that our traditional paper-based newspapers and newspapers would be replaced by the Internet, but it turned out that people's reading habits still tend to be the traditional way of reading, so the paper and the presentation tools for these images and texts—inks, are still Can not be abandoned. But now, people's requirements for books are also getting more and more exquisite. This increases the weight of the books to some extent. Therefore, books are no longer simply a tool for leisure, but have become a burden to a certain extent. How can we make traditional books lighter, easier to carry, and increase the amount of information? We need to reconstruct the paper, and electronic ink is the tool for presenting graphics on this new material.

2. Structured electronic ink is produced by E-ink Corporation of the United States, which has the appearance of traditional paper ink and the ability of electronic display. The structure is shown in Figure 1. It is itself a liquid consisting of millions of microcapsules with a diameter of about 100 μm (similar to the thickness of the hair), and the capsule consists of white particles suspended on colored dyes. White particles are key substances and are small particles of titanium oxide. The microparticle capsule is sandwiched between two electric fields of opposite polarity. When titanium oxide itself is negatively charged and the electric field applied to it is positive, it will move to a positively charged surface. - It can then display white pixels; if the polarity is reversed, the negatively charged titanium oxide particles are repelled away from the top layer, the dyed ink is revealed, and these different colored capsules can be properly arranged and assembled. A variety of letters and patterns are printed to obtain a grayscale image by controlling the position of the titanium oxide particles in the capsule. As long as this electronic paper is not damaged, it can be reused numerous times.

3. Advantages Compared to traditional inks, some advantages of electronic inks are outstanding:

1 High printability, suitable for almost all materials. Regardless of its obvious personality, electronic ink is always an ink, it must have the basic ink compatibility - printability. It can be printed on textiles, paper, plastics and many other materials. Unlike liquid crystal displays, electronic inks can be displayed on plastic surfaces, making them slim, flexible, and non-breakable.

2 The sharpness of the edge is high and the image is clear. Compared with the image formed by the electronic ink and the image formed by the electrophotographic dry powder using a device with higher precision, the former has a sharper degree of sharpness, and this advantage is more prominent in the continuous adjustment of the image during printing.

3 good lightfastness, not easy to fade. Unlike traditional inks, pigment particles in electronic inks are encapsulated in plastic resins that protect the pigment's chemical composition from oxidation or humid air, and do not change under ultraviolet light.

4 Dry quickly. For traditional inks, the ink will have a dry process after reaching the substrate. For different inks, the drying performance is also different, and the required time is not fixed. It is appropriate for different printing processes. Further drying is performed, but this is not required for electronic ink. Once the electronic ink is transferred to the substrate, it will be automatically cured, so it can be said to be instantaneously dry.