The flexo press manufacturer’s patented Zer0Waste System eliminates wasted time, energy, materials and chemicals through automated AI-driven printing press set up.
On its 20th anniversary and with growing numbers, Expert Srl confirms and reinforces its R&D trend of constant improvement and a fair attention to the environment.
At K-Fair in Düsseldorf in 2022, Expert presented its Zer0Waste System as a revolutionary start in flexographic printing, eliminating the wasted time, materials and energy typical of the printing press set-up phase, to which the world has long been accustomed.
In a well organised printing operation and on a time span of two shifts, the print manager may need to set up printing pressures and register for a new job up to 20 times a day on each press, as production runs get shorter and shorter and profit lies in many short runs, rather than in day long production runs. Each set-up operation may take a few minutes, a quarter of an hour or perhaps even longer, depending on the press characteristics, the team’s organisation, the working conditions and the operator’s ability, which results in a huge waste of time, material and chemicals every day. Reducing downtime is a must, and for many years Expert has taken this subject as its everyday challenge.
Through progressive phases of observation, study, ingenious invention leading to quite a few patents, and by thinking ‘in the printer’s shoes’, Expert’s technical team has reached excellence in press positioning accuracy, reliable repeatability and HMI simplification, so that the printer’s job has become extremely easy.
But this was not enough for Expert.
By employing Artificial Intelligence, Expert made that necessary further step to perfection: the dream every printer has been longing for is starting a new job by just pressing a push-button: the Zer0Waste system, which was presented at K-show 2022.
Under a world-wide patent, Zer0Waste is an interactive system that allows the press to set perfect register and pressure without human intervention, printing perfect images from the start. Before the image reaches the video-camera, the press has done its job.
All aspects of a press are involved: the mechanical top-level components, the accurate workmanship, the excellence in ever-evolving proprietary software programs, and the final extra capability coming from Artificial Intelligence, to outperform any previous existing system.
The kit is composed of a dedicated plate mounter and the brand-new model of press, Active 809-ZW. At drupa 2024, Expert will display the performance of a press that changes production with literally no waste of print substrate.
Patents involve the plate mounter, the press mounting systems, the electronics and the Artificial Intelligence developments, ensuring that the Zer0Waste system constantly improves its performance, along with the press’ daily utilisation: the system learns from the operator’s behaviour and keeps on refining its parameters over and over.
This innovation allows the print manager to devote themself to much higher professional functions, such as the management of the printed image, the colour matching, the logistic organization of the print factory, the print quality control and the optimisation of the printing team’s work.
But Expert is not content with this.
Another aspect of waste reduction is the loss of product at change of reels due to the overlapping ‘tail’ at splice. Expert has re-designed the splice systems of unwinders (and rewinders) to minimise this waste, now practically non-existent. More than the product saving, it is above all a clear sign of great engineering and design, and mastering sequence timing and increased speed of data exchange at the moment of splice.
In the same environmental direction, and to further reduce waste of all kinds, Expert has engineered an ink container that reduces the minimum amount of ink needed to activate printing and the consequent ink residue at the end of the job. This new concept includes a specially shaped tank and a predictive system of ink quantity to be used in a print run: the operator will be informed to introduce exactly the amount of ink needed for the current job and, in case of any update, the system calls on the necessary amount of ink to finish the job.
Similarly, the use of detergents is dramatically reduced in the new AC-System, the Expert automatic inking circuit washing program, based on optimisation of quantities of fresh and pre-used solvents or detergents, and the ingenious way to manage the flow of fluids through the system.
In Expert’s approach to printing, wasted time, materials, inks and chemicals are no longer an issue.
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