Xaar

(Xaar Jet AB :: Sweden :: Industrial Partner)

Web site: www.xaarjet.com

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Description

XaarJet AB is located in J?rf?lla, a northern suburb of Stockholm, Sweden, and it presently has about 150 employees.

XaarJet AB produces piezo-based inkjet printheads for the OEM market. The manufacturing of the printhead requires a number of high-tech micro-systems engineering processes like micro-sawing of piezo ceramics, vacuum deposition, laser ablation of nozzle plates, high precision assembly processes to name a few. Manufacturing is carried out in XaarJet AB's clean-rooms and temperature controlled rooms on site. Xaar's portfolio of printheads comprises printheads with different numbers of nozzles, from 126 to 500, and with different ink drop volumes, from 5 pl to 80 pl. Xaar has inkjet printheads for printing binary pattern and printheads for 'grey scale' pattern for photo-quality.

Presently there are more than 150 different customers, who employ the Xaar-printheads in their applications. These applications are almost entirely industrial applications. For example has Xaar a large share of printheads in 'wide format' and 'grand format printing'. Such printers that allow print widths of up to 5 m contain typically 30 to 50 printheads and are used to produce e.g. large area banners. An ever increasing amount of industrial applications deals with printing of different types of inks onto various substrates, like paper, carton, plastic, vinyl, metal, ceramic etc. Even printing of tiles has become state of the art with Xaar-type inkjet printheads.

Piezo-based inkjet printheads can jet a wide regime of different inks, like oil-based inks, solvent-based inks, and UV-curing inks. Under development are printheads for water-based printhead as well. In all the Xaar-type piezo printheads can serve applications that cannot be performed with 'bubble jet' inkjet printheads, which need water-based ink systems for drop formation.

The ever growing number of applications of inkjet printing is based mainly on two factors, namely that inkjet printing is digital (i.e. does not need a hardware mask), and the wide portfolio of inks that can be jetted with a piezo-based inkjet printhead.

XaarJet AB will provide into the SUSTAINPACK project its knowhow in inkjet printing technology, will provide its specialized equipment to analyze drop formation and print quality, and, of most importance, will provide apart from its commercial printheads even those development type printheads, that will suit SUSTAINPACK's special tasks best.

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