Understanding your customers' customers' requirements

Understanding not only your customers' but also your customers' customers' requirements is the key to successful product development. With recent advances in technology, we are now able to better define our customers' fiber lengths and drainage forces in relation to filtering media hole size. Working with our customers' customers - the printer and printing ink suppliers - we have developed basic understandings that can be directly related to filtering media structures. This paper presents the way in which micro-density differences in the sheet can and will directly affect the final print quality through their impact on the printing ink's absorption rate into each side of the sheet surface. These differences are not only created by the different paper-machine drainage forces on each side of the sheet but are also controlled by the relationship between headbox stock fiber length and filtering media hole sizes. We will also examine how printing screen angles and the twills found in filtering media structures can combine to create a moire affecting final print quality.