ABSTRACT

Runnability has been a point of strong attention among most of the dry toner based digital printers. Runnability is the capability of substrate to run smoothly from infeed to outfeed unit during the printing work. But most of the digital printers are suffering from the runnability problems due to the lack of knowledge of substrates characteristics contributing to the runnability. For the better theoretical background work in this area, a runnability model already has been developed to get aware of the prominent surface characteristics of substrates contributing to the runnability problems. In the present work a survey of digital printers of the North India was carried out to understand the awareness level of digital printers about the runnability behaviour of dry toner based digital printing machines in relation to the cellulosic substrate characteristics. A questionnaire was prepared to identify the runnability related problems digital printers are facing in the northern region of India on the Likert Scale of 1-5. The degree of challenge posed by various characteristics of cellulosic substrates on dry toner digital printing presses has been examined by EFA (Exploratory Factor Analysis) tool using SPSS 11.5 version. Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin value is found 0.795 and Bartlett’s test of sphericity values are found (0.000) which indicated that exploratory factor analysis used in the research work is highly feasible and significant. The Exploratory Factor Analysis used in this paper indicated that there are two major factors namely; Paper Runnability Index-I and Paper Runnability Index-II which leads to 65.9% of the total runnability results.

KEYWORDS: – Runnability, Dry Toner based Digital Printing Press, Curling, Heating, Moisture Content, Linting, Stiffness, Grain Direction, Exploratory Factor Analysis