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Improving Your Inks With Specialty Minerals’ Calcium Carbonates

Formulating your flexographic, gravure, lithographic or silk screen printing inks with precipitated or ground calcium carbonates can improve quality while reducing costs.

Specialty Minerals Inc. (SMI) produces a variety of ultrafine or nano, superfine, and fine precipitated calcium carbonates (PCCs), and fine ground calcium carbonates (GCCs) useful for inks. These functional fillers can be uncoated or coated. Stearic acid coating provides hydrophobicity, improved dispersion and better compatibility with oil- or non-aqueous-based systems.


Improvements In Ink Quality
The ways in which SMI PCCs or GCCs can contribute to your inks include:

  • Color development—including a fine extender can help dispersion, as well as acting as a pigment particle spacer, maximizing the efficiency of the more expensive color and titanium dioxide pigments.
  • Rheology—the ultrafine, nano PCCs can contribute rheological control to paste and PVC plastisol screen inks, providing viscosity, yield value and, for offset inks, mist control, at moderate filler levels. Milder rheological effects more appropriate with liquid inks are also possible with lower loadings of the ultrafine PCCs, and with the superfine or fine PCCs. 
  • Image quality—The small particle sized ultrafine nano PCCs can produce highest gloss inks. The rheological control can also help ensure high image clarity and dot sharpness.   
  • Low abrasivity—both PCC and GCC are softer minerals than silicas, feldspars and similar minerals that may be used in ink formulas. 
  • Consistent quality—PCCs are synthesized, allowing greater control and uniformity of particle size and particle size distribution, which can translate into greater uniformity of print quality throughout the run, and better run-to-run consistency. SMI’s tight quality control of the grinding process for GCC products ensures excellent consistency, as well.


Specialty Minerals Products For Ink
SMI offers five groups of calcium carbonates for inks, differing in particle size and economy, giving ink formulators flexibility in extender raw material choice.

Click here for an ink product selector chart, to help you determine which products are suitable for your ink type.

The SMI calcium carbonates for inks are:

  • Nano or Ultrafine PCCs:
    The definition of nano is less than 100 nanometers, or 0.1 micron.  SMI nano PCC products are 70 nanometers, or 0.07 microns. The uncoated PCC products are named Multifex-MM® in the U.S. and Calofort® U in the U.K. Coated versions are Ultra-Pflex® PCC, made in the U.S., and Calofort® S or SV PCC, made in the U.K.
  • Superfine PCCs:
    Albafil® PCC, and its coated counterpart, Super-Pflex® 100 PCC, are 0.7 microns in size.  They possess many of the same attributes of the nano grades, at a lower cost, for inks where performance demands are less than the maximum.
  • Fine PCCs:
    Albacar® 5970 PCC, made in the U.S. and Calopake® 5970 PCC, made in the U.K. are about 2 microns in size, with a high surface area “starburst” shape. This morphology can enhance opacity and viscosity in water-based flexo inks. They are only available uncoated.
  • Fine GCCs:
    3 micron ground limestones: Vicron® 15-15 and RiverCalTM 8103 GCCs are high quality fine fillers for economy formulation inks. Hi-Pflex® GCC is a coated 3 micron product. The Vicron® and Hi-Pflex® 100 PCC grades are manufactured in Adams, Massachusetts and Lucerne Valley, California. RiverCalTM 8103 GCC is also in this category.
  • Filler GCCs:
    For general filling and extending are the rest of the Vicron® and  RiverCalTM 8100 series ground calcium carbonates, with particle sizes up to 17 microns, and for thick film applications, the Marblewhite® ground limestones of 325 and 200 mesh sizes.

 


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