The ystral process system fully met the expectations of the customer. The high degree of automation guarantees a reproducible and repeatable product quality. A key driver for the investment by the customer was the need to produce different coloured inks on one and the same system, with the ability to clean, fully automatically, without operator intervention, and with the minimum amount of cleaning liquids. These targets were successfully realized in this project.
Process plant for liquid inks
- Industry:
- Printing Inks
- End product:
Liquid Inks – Solvent Based Gravure
- Application:
Dispersion of pigments in solvent

The customer requirements:
- Capacity: 2 t/h
- Batch size: 2 t
- Space requirement: 5 x 5 x 4,5 m
- Degree of automation: high
- Powder feed: powder container
- Cleanability: automated cleaning process
- Fill capacity powder tank: 2000 l
- Fluid addition: automated
- Solids content: approx. 50% depending on colour
Advantages compared to the previous process
- The system is specifically designed for colour changes. Black to yellow colour changes are realized within measurable contamination limits of 100ppm (0.01%).
- The ystral process system was built as a compact unit on a base frame with load cells. In front of it, a powder container receiving station is placed, through which the pigments are added. The finished product is filled directly from the system into barrels for delivery. The filling lines are also then cleaned automatically with the system.
- The solids are inducted, dust-free and without any losses, from the powder container, directly into the liquid up to 250 kg/min using ystral technology. The pigments are immediately wetted and dispersed producing the ideal mill base for processing through a bead mill to achieve the final quality.
- Since the powder containers are filled outside the production area, a separation of the powder handling to the production area is created and thus the formation of dust from powder handling in the production area is eliminated.
- Considerable reduction of process times compared to dissolver technology.
- The subsequent bead milling process time is reduced by an average of 50% and the bead mills are integrated into the cleaning process.