Gravure Printing

Steve Zeleb had just become operations manager at Madrigal Flexographics, a manufacturer of
high quality, gravure printed packaging material used in the packaging and wrapping of quality
food products such as chocolate bars, ice creams, biscuits and cookies. Madrigal had a very
successful history and a lot of satisfied customers, but lately its quality had started to suffer. A
good customer had returned an entire batch of packaging material (about AUD50k worth) when it
discovered that some of it had not passed their own inspection. The nature and source of the
problem were not immediately obvious to the manufacturing team at Madrigal, nor to Steve. He
would have to investigate.
Gravure Printing
Gravure is traditionally used to produce long-run and high quality magazines and flexible
packaging and is possibly one of the simplest of the printing processes but at the same time one
of the most difficult processes to control. Figure 1 shows a schematic of a gravure printing
process. The material, called the web, passes through a set of, in this case nine, cylinders, where
each cylinder prints a single colour onto the web. Each cylinder, the image carrier, is engraved
with the image specific to that colour and this engraving service is provided by an outside supplier.
Cylinder preparation is a complex process and there are a number of cylinder specific variables
that the engraver must get correct. One of these is the cylinder diameter. In order to guarantee
that there is constant tension on the web material along the entire length of the press, so that the
web does not flap or become baggy, there is a progression in the diameter of each consecutive
cylinder by about 0.001”. In addition the taper of each cylinder must be controlled to within
0.03mm over its length, which, for Madrigal, is around 1200mm.

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