Eolo by Inter Ser

The advent of digital printing entailed the need to solve the problem of tile temperature during printing. To operate an ink-jet machine correctly, in fact, you need to print on a surface that is not too hot.

Inter Ser is now able to present a machine that can solve a variety of problems associated with the use of the most common digital machines, through the application of compressed air. According to operating conditions, Eolo is able to reduce the temperature by around 5-10 °C and totally eliminate water evaporation from the tiles’ surface before infeed to the digital machine.

The system consists of a low-power-consumption cooling machine connected to the compressed air network. The machine turns the incoming compressed air into cool, dry air at a temperature of 2-4 °C and automatically discharges the condensation. The tiles are cooled by means of 4 or 6 rows of linear diffusers located above the conveyor belt, which intercept the incoming tiles and reduce their temperature.

The flow of cool, dry air over the tiles reduces their surface temperature and, more importantly, temporarily eliminates evaporation from the tile surface, thus enabling the digital machine to operate in optimum conditions. This extends the service-life of the printing heads and reduces the number of cleaning cycles.

A further key strength of Eolo is its excellent power consumption/benefit ratio. In its standard configuration for applications on 600x600 mm tiles (equipped with four 750 mm cooling bars set to a pressure of 2.8 bar), the system consumes the equivalent of 8.4 kW. This value is much lower than that of any other cooling system currently on the market.

The heavy-duty configuration with six 750 mm cooling bars and a maximum operating pressure of 5 bar consumes the equivalent of 16 kW. This means that Eolo is not only the most cost-effective solution in terms of initial investment but, more importantly, it is the solution with the lowest operating costs. A further feature of Eolo is the fact that it runs only when needed. The machine is equipped with an electrical panel that uses a sensor to detect the presence of a tile on the conveyor line and shuts down the airflow when tiles are absent in order to make further energy savings. The cool airflow then automatically restarts as soon as required.

Eolo is simple to use and highly versatile. It can be installed before any digital machine without the need to make modifications to the line and delivers good results even at very high line speeds (65 pieces per minute). With more than 250 installations up and running worldwide, Eolo is currently the most widely used and tested machine in the industry.