By Ekachai Tholueng

Award  Silver  Prize : Seoul  International  Invention  Fair  2009 (SIIF 2009)

This prototype in-office applicator applies water-based varnish to various thicknesses and lengths of paper and perfect for small to large offices who need to protect printed materials from wear and tear.  A typical A4 sheet of paper takes just 30 seconds. This applicator applies varnish to paper sizes from 50 mm. to a maximum of 310 mm. in width, with out regard to length and is inexpensive to operate.  It was designed and constructed to be light weight with dimentions that measure 112 x 538 x 330 mm. and weighs 10 kg.  The results for matted and gloss paper coated with varnish after inkjet printing are demonstrated as follows:  The printed material with the coating was found more resistant to abrasion.  The treated glossy paper had a high gloss containing 4.9 gloss units (GU) with 0.2 mm of added varnish thickness and uncoated 90 gram paper had a high gloss factor at about 13.5 GU and with 1.0 mm additional thickness.  Using an adhesive tape test, when the tape was stripped from the two subjects, the treated paper was nearly absent of paper fiber or inkjet ink, whereas, the untreated paper gave up much of its paper fiber and ink.  Spectrophotometer analysis revealed that the color magenta was the color that had the greatest variance in shade, whereas, the other colors remained virtually true.  The applied varnish was ±0.005 mm thick and it was applied smoothly.

DOWNLOAD