Probing Interfacial Acid-Base Interactions in Ink-Substrate Adhesion

Ink-substrate adhesion critically impacts the print and page attributes of advanced printing technologies. Here the authors show that interfacial acid-base interaction (A-BI) plays an important role in the enhancement of ink-substrate adhesion. Successful probing of the ink-substrate interface via surface-sensitive attenuated-total-reflectance Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy reveals intricate transient A-BI behavior, which appears to dominate the initial phase of adhesion in a printed substrate. The authors also demonstrate that macroscopic adhesion strength between an ink layer and a substrate can be correlated directly to the extent of A-BI. Their observation could potentially pave new directions for future advancement of high speed digital printing technology and could have important implications in other marking material systems. (c) 2010 Society for Imaging Science and Technology. [DOI: 10.2352/J.ImagingSci.Technol.2010.54.1.010504]