Thermal Transfer Printers and Feeding Systems

Off-line overprinting offers high quality and high versatility

Understandably, much effort is focussed on the efficiency of production lines: the hours in a day for which they are producing and the speed at which they run. The coding system is often a small part of such a line, yet can be one of the more complex items. In addition the range of coding technologies available for use on-line can be limited by the speed and production method.

Offline Thermal Transfer Printing

Coding packs off-line may not suit all applications, but can offer great benefits if a large amount of high quality print needs to be added to a pack. It can also solve the problem of how to supply one or a number of hand-pack lines with coded components, be they cartons, sleeves, envelopes or labels.

One such technology commonly employed offline is Thermal Transfer Printing as it offers a high-resolution print in a package that is easy to set up and totally clean in operation. There can be few production facilities that do not somewhere have a bench top thermal printer producing some form of label.

Print Feeding Systems

By combining the right type of thermal printer with a suitable feeding system just about any item can be printed off-line and at surprisingly high rates of throughput.

For many years Rotech Machines have produced a feeding system for folded and glued cartons and sleeves that has satisfied the demands of the food, pharmaceutical and healthcare markets to add a simple lot number, expiry or use-by date to their packs, off-line.

More recently the range has expanded to include systems that can feed a much wider range of materials such as blister cards, seed envelopes, medical device pouches; even single cut sheets of paper and, most recently, bags and sacks made from either paper or film.

Fitted with a thermal transfer printer these systems can address a wide range of coding applications of which the following are just a selection:

• Printing seed packs with all the information relating to the product inside, saving huge stocks of pre-printed product and delivering only the packs that are needed, when they are needed;
• Marking a medical device pouch with a bar code, expiry date and bar code where the only alternative is to pre-print a label and apply it by hand;
• Customising a generic automotive blister pack with a bar code and product description where the number of variants runs to several hundred;

• Printing single cut sheets of medical paper, used as a lidding device, with a 2D-bar code along with the usual traceability codes, so guaranteeing product integrity as the code is printed on, not stuck to the lid and cannot be removed or tampered with;

• Printing direct onto large sacks of food ingredients instead of hand applying a pre-printed label.

Offline Overprinting

In all these examples the task of overprinting has been carried out, in the customer's facility under their full control, prior to the product being packed.

Delivering pre-printed components to the line can reduce its complexity and help keep those all-important production efficiencies up.

Rotech Machines offer innovative solutions to a wide range of off-line overprinting applications. As well as extensive in-house testing facilities, they can bring any one of a number of systems to a customer's site to demonstrate its capabilities to the people who need to run it with the products they need to handle.