ANALYSIS OF CONTACT PRESSURE IN SHEET-FED OFFSET PRINTING

1. INTRODUCTION

1.1 ABOUT THE COMPANY

HMT Ltd was established in 1053 in technical collaboration with M/s Oerlikon of Switzerland. Over the years many new products have been added to its manufacturing range .It has technical collaboration with over 30 leading international engineering companies for manufacturing of various products. HMTs diversified product range includes Machine tools, Watches, Tractors, Printing machines, Press, Die casting and Plastic injection moulding machine, food processing machinery, CNC system ball screw etc. HMT (International) Ltd is an owned subsidiary of HMT Ltd, a Government of India undertaking. HMT (I) was set up in 1974 to handle international projects and export products of its parent company and other Indian manufacturers. HMTs range of products is marked internationally by its subsidiary HMT (International) Ltd. HMT (I) also exports machine tools and other engineering products manufactured by other reputed firms in India backed by efficient after sales service. HMT (I)s global network extends over 38 countries with 60 representations to service its products worldwide.

1.2 PRINTING HISTORY

Printing may be described as the art of producing identical copies of the master image using ink and applying pressure. Original printing process started perhaps with the invention of paper around the second century A.D by the Chinese. For about a thousand years, the printing process consisted of the primitive method of carving the surface of a smooth piece of wood until the letters to be printed stood out in relief and as an inverted image and pressing this prepared wood against paper after applying available pigments on the relief image. On this occasion we cannot forget Gutenberg, father of printing, who successfully invented the basic model of a printing machine. Printing made rapid progress with the invention of movable type by Laurens Janszoom of Holland in 1423. In1976, Johann Senfelder, while walking in the rain, noticed a curious thing. While water wetted most of his clothing, water just

flowed over and did not wet places in his clothes smeared with grease. This set him thinking and the historic discovery of Lithographic printing was thus made. This process dominates the printing industry to this day. At the turn of 20th century, the Americans, to keep the printing in pace with the mass production era, invested photogravure process.World over, rapid developments are taking place in the lithographic and photogravure process, to improve the quality of printing, to increase the speeds and to shorten the preparation time of the masters.

1.3 PRINTING METHODS

The 3 methods of printing in use today are the Letterpress or relief printing, Lithographic or Plano graphic printing and Intaglio or Gravure printing. Printing Process

Method

Relief

Lithographic

Intaglio

Machines Platen Stop Cylinder Two revolution Rotary

Offset Collo Type Screen Process Rotary

Photogravure Rotary

Principle Printing surface Printing & nonPrinting surfaces On the same plane

Printing surface recessed

2.OFFSET PRINTING
The most widely used type of Lithographic printing is the offset printing. The term offset accordingly illustrates clearly, that the ink must first set off on the blanket, before it reaches the paper surface.

Basically the offset machine consists of three continuously revolving cylinders. The first cylinder carries the printing plate with the image right way around. the second cylinder carries a rubber blanket on which the plate cylinder prints the image in reverse. The third cylinder carries the paper. This reversed image from the blanket cylinder is now transferred onto the paper, to get the readable print. For high volume work, such as newspapers, textbooks etc. offset rotary machines fitted with automatic paper feeders are used. There is practically no limit in the offset processes. Offset machines are now available from standard A4 size to 140*200 cm papers, the limiting factor being the paper only. As compared to letter presses the offset machines have very high mechanical efficiency, because there is no reciprocating motion of heavy masses and the cylinders keep constantly rotating in the same direction without any stoppage during the printing process. But due to the intermediate stage (blanket cylinder) from the master to the paper, very shape images are difficult to obtain. Basically the offset printing mechanism consists of five units. 1) 2) 3) 4) 5) Printing unit Dampening and inking units Feeder unit Delivery unit Register mechanism

3.FINITE ELEMENT MODELLING AND ANALYSIS

FE method is an approximate method in the structure/component is divided into a grid of elements, which form a model of real structure. Each of the elements is a simple shape (such as square or triangle) for which the finite element program has information to write the governing equations in the form of stiffness matrix. The unknowns for each element are the temperatures at node points, which are the points at which elements are connected. The finite element program assembles the stiffness matrices for these simple elements together to form the global matrix for the entire model. This stiffness matrix is solved for the unknown temperatures, given the known heat flux and boundary conditions. The temperature s at the nodes are approximated/ transferred to another node by what is called shape functions. Angle elements thus essentially differ in its shape function which is unique to each element type.

STEPS IN FE ANALYSIS
FE modeling consists of three steps. These are: Pre-processing- defining the finite element model and environmental factors to be applied to it. Solutions- solution of finite element model Post-processing of results using visualization tools