Marking and coding food packaging and beverages

At the Fach­pack 2018 trade fair, Paul Leibinger GmbH & Co. KG was pre­sent­ing the Jet One – a new indus­tri­al inkjet print­er for mark­ing and cod­ing food pack­ag­ing, bev­er­ages and con­sumer goods.

“In 2018, Leibinger is con­sis­tent­ly posi­tion­ing itself for the broad mar­ket in the area of indus­tri­al mark­ing and cod­ing sys­tems. We devel­oped a new entry-lev­el mod­el with this in mind. The Jet One is equipped with the same reli­able tech­nol­o­gy as all our print­er lines and is 100% made in Ger­many. We did not com­pro­mise at all on qual­i­ty and reliability.”
Christi­na Leibinger, Man­ag­ing Pro­pri­etor of Paul Leibinger GmbH & Co KG

268 m/min. top speed / 120 million characters with a liter of ink

The Jet One is suit­able for mark­ing and cod­ing food pack­ag­ing, bev­er­ages and con­sumer prod­ucts, with fixed and vari­able data such as best-before date, LOT and batch num­ber and graph­ics. The mark­ing takes place with­out con­tact with fly­ing drops of ink, mak­ing it suit­able for con­vex and con­cave, rough and smooth, flat and relief-mold­ed prod­uct surfaces.
You can print coun­try and indus­try-spe­cif­ic fonts with a char­ac­ter height of 1.5 to 8 mm in up to two lines. Since the ink dries in less than a sec­ond – on plas­tic, glass, wood, met­al, ceram­ics, tech­ni­cal com­pos­ites, card­board and paper alike – the CIJ print­er can han­dle pro­duc­tion speeds of up to 268 m/min. Ink con­sump­tion is min­i­mal: the Jet One prints up to 120 mil­lion char­ac­ters with only one liter of ink.

Production reliability and reduced maintenance requirements

The pack­ag­ing indus­try is fac­ing increas­ing cost pres­sure, strives for pro­duc­tion opti­mi­sa­tion, and is intent on avoid­ing down­time. The prob­lem most users face with many CIJ print­ers is that the ink dries dur­ing pro­duc­tion breaks. This caus­es time-con­sum­ing clean­ing that delays pro­duc­tion restarts. In the worst-case sce­nario, the print­ing is dif­fuse with illeg­i­ble type and expen­sive rework­ing required dur­ing production.
The solu­tion in the case of the Jet One print­er is its unique Seal­tron­ic fea­ture, a noz­zle seal­ing sys­tem that keeps the ink fresh dur­ing pro­duc­tion breaks. If the user switch­es off the print­er, the gut­ter moves to the noz­zle with a spin­dle dri­ve. Only then does the inkjet turn off. The ink cir­cuit is there­fore her­met­i­cal­ly sealed. “Many users of CIJ print­ers are forced to clean their sys­tems for up to sev­er­al hours a day,” says Leibinger. “This is com­plete­ly elim­i­nat­ed thanks to Sealtronic.”

Easy integration and intuitive

The Jet One fea­tures the key inter­faces for inte­gra­tion into the com­pa­ny infra­struc­ture: via a prod­uct sen­sor input (PNP/NPN 24 V), an incre­men­tal encoder input (TTL 5 V, HTL 24 V, RS 422 5 V), a dig­i­tal input, three dig­i­tal out­puts and a USB port. The print head can be flex­i­bly posi­tioned thanks to a three-metre-long umbil­i­cal cable – even for over­head applications.
The com­pa­ny has also designed the user inter­face so that intu­itive oper­a­tion is pos­si­ble with­out a long train­ing peri­od. Oper­a­tion is via a 5.7‑inch TFT touch screen dis­play (VGA) and fol­lows the what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) prin­ci­ple. The rep­re­sen­ta­tion on the dis­play cor­re­sponds to the print­ed image one-to-one. There­fore, new jobs can be start­ed with­out any wast­ed time.