From anilox roller to engraved ceramic anilox roller

Anilox roller is originally from about 1938, which has more than 70 years of history till now. Its invention is purely for supporting the birth of flexible printing. It can be said that because of the flexible printing, there are anilox rollers.

The first anilox roller is made of iron roller, and then embossing engraved on the surface of the roller, the production is rough, and the wearing is also very large during printing. So quality and printing costs are difficult to be guaranteed, restricting the flexible printing promotion. At that time, the flexible printing was mainly used in carton packaging.

Flexographic industry made a progress in 1939, they electroplated a layer of hard chrome on the surface of curved roller to increase its external hardness(usually between HRC55-HRC60 or HV600-750 ) and extended the service life, which is the rudiment of electroplated chrome metal anilox roller that we see now.However,it can't meet the demand of fine printing owing to its rough curved mesh and low screen density thereby restrains further development of flexography. Electroplated metal anilox roller has better mechining accuracy and quality than before, so it has a large share in the application market of anilox roller, basically divided as electronic engraving and mechanical extrusion,and the screen density is usually less than 300 lines/inch(about 120 lines/cm).

Under the development of thermal spray processing industry, someone suggestted using ceramic coatings to make anilox roller in1970, but it just remained at theory stage as they had high hardness (up to HRC70,HV1100) and were difficult to curve. Only by 1984 the mature development and application of laser technology, ceramic anilox roll was officially launched. The first processing of Ceramic anilox roll is using NiAl95/5, NiCr80/20 as the bonding layer with arc spraying. Second, using high-energy plasma thermal spraying, the surface of the metal roller sprayed with a layer of Cr2O3 metal oxide ceramic material. Finally the ceramic layer achieves a mirror surface by precision grinding and polishing process, and then complete the shape of the engraving by high energy laser to make the ceramic layer gasification.