Air Flash

Air Flash dryers help a lot when you’re trying to flash dry water-based inks. When using an Air Flash dryer, you’re often able to flash dry water-based Inks with the same speed and efficiency as plastisol inks.

In water-based inks, water is used as the vehicle used to distribute the color pigments. Once the water has accomplished its job, it’s time to remove it so the pigments can adhere to the garment. But the water can’t be wiped away, so to rid the ink of the water it must be evaporated using heat.

Sound easy? Well, not really. If water is evaporated with a traditional infrared-only flash unit, a situation called surface boiling happens. Surface boiling occurs when water on the ink heats to a boiling point of 212º but doesn’t have a means to escape.

An Air Flash dryer uses heated air to evaporate the water on the ink. BBC uses a specially designed element in our Air Flash dryer, which allows hot air to be pushed through the element itself onto the garment. The air sweeps across the garment, picking up water molecules as it passes. It works so well that, as mentioned earlier, water-based paints can be flash cured in roughly the same amount of time as plastisol paints. Thus an Air Flash dryer can improve productivity reports for both water-based paints as well as plastisol paints.

Heat Control

Heat controls have become a luxury item in flash curing. A flash dryer uses a Cal rod, flat panel emitter, or quartz tubes, which are all infrared heating sources. Infrared heat waves share a common heat distribution formula that decreases the heat distribution of the waves for every inch the flash dryer is moved away from the garment. Thus distance is a natural built-in heat control of infrared flash dryers.

Some instances in which heat controls may be needed include when using manmade materials like polyesters. In these instances there are two options: (1) regulate the flash temperature with a heat control, or (2) raise the flash away from the garment to a predetermined distance.

This is the reason a heat control is a luxury item. If the budget allows this option, though, having a heat control avoids trying to move a hot flash dryer.

Auto Flash

Automatic Flash units are flash heaters that are mounted directly to the head of an automatic press. An Auto Flash unit comes in handy when needing to flash on an automatic. A hands-free automatic process can be created by setting the flash dwell times using the control panel on the press. This automatic process allows the flash to hang harmlessly away from the platen without needing monitoring.