Evo Plus, the new digital frontier

The range of products for digital ceramic tile decoration from Projecta Engineering and Siti B&T Group have been enhanced with new technological contents. The Evolve family (Evo Five and Evo Seven, available in three printing width versions 70, 112 and 133 cm) and present on the market with a world reference list of 119 installed machines and 41 Digiplot plotters, now comes in the form of standard machines and plus machines. Using a dedicated upgrade kit, each Evolve machine can be transformed into an Evo Plus. The main characteristic of Evo Plus machines is their shape, which enables them to house conventional printheads and/or new-generation high-performance printheads.

Evolve Plus therefore maintains all the characteristics of the Evolve family while offering additional competitive factors.

The new features of Evo Plus

The Evo Plus decorating machine is able to decorate at double speed whilst maintaining maximum resolution: 48 minutes, 360x360 dpi. Alternatively, for markets that do not require extremely high speeds there is the choice of double jetting with droplets of up to 84 picolitres (10^-12 l), while maintaining maximum resolution printing. Whereas a standard printhead is able to deposit at most 42 pl, the new printhead can discharge double that via a standard 12 pl droplet multiplied by 7 types in order to obtain eight greyscale levels. This results in high decorating accuracy as doubling the drop increases precision. 

These two configurations that can be chosen by ceramic producer companies make the machine highly versatile. It is ideal both for mature, traditional markets where product quality is the most important factor (so double discharge is preferable as extremely high speeds are unnecessary) and for emerging markets where high speed and productivity are paramount. In all cases, the operating speed can be chosen and configuration changed with great simplicity, and it is even possible to switch automatically from one mode to the other as speed changes. This ensures full customisation of the machine.

Like the entire Evolve family, the Evo Plus machines are also equipped with proprietary electronics made directly by Projecta Engineering in Italy.  

The entire Evolve family offers many more advantages.

Space saving

It is an extremely compact family of machines. Evo Seven is the only model on the market to house seven colours in just 3.33 metres; Evo Five on the other hand can house up to 5 colours in a space of 2.80 m. This is particularly important in quality-oriented markets such as Italy where the lines inside factories are highly complex and the long-established production activities sometimes lead to problems of limited space.

Seven upgradable colours

It takes just ten minutes to switch from a 4-colour to a 10-colour configuration. This ensures considerable time savings, a particularly important factor in periods like the present when it is essential to be able to change decoration techniques frequently. Given the rapid pace of change of the market, it is essential for production lines to have a high degree of flexibility and speed of adaptation. While four-colour decoration is now taken for granted, producers are facing two different choices: adding special colours to give added value to the product, or introducing new decorative effects that have nothing to do with colours (material effects of various kinds). If the machines are not sufficiently flexible, these changes in production may require a two or three day stoppage, an eventuality that may have considerable negative consequences.

Maximum colour system flexibility

The Evolve machines allow the colour system to be moved easily by means of a simple sequence change of the colour box. This makes it possible to programme different effects from line 1 to line 2. Given the high degree of flexibility of the line, all that is required to customise production is a box for insertion into the machine. Furthermore, these operations can be performed without the need for cleaning.

The colour box contains all the electronics, the hydraulics, the printhead and the colour slot. The machine is an open system that is not restricted by the initial choice of colours made by the producer, and can be modified in terms of both position and settings (number of colours present).

The system also allows ink and colour producers to use a colour box and equip it with a colour or material proposal needed to perform rapid in-line testing in the customer's glazing and firing conditions. This takes just a few hours and can be done without stopping the production line (which would incur additional costs) or washing all the components.

Ease of access and maintenance

The Evolve family is designed so that the operator can extract the colour box in an upright posture and allows easy and full accessibility of all parts, printheads included. This ensures outstanding ease of access and maintenance.

Fully automatic cleaning

The machine cleaning operation is fully automatic and takes just 60 seconds. 

The control system tells the press to halt production for a minute and the machine begins automatic cleaning. Alternatively, the machine can use any stoppage in production to perform the cleaning cycle, which requires at most 24 minutes a day over 20-22 hours of operation.

Extraction bars

The extraction bars present on each colour bar remove the vapour originating from the tiles as well as the overspray sometimes produced by the colours, thereby protecting the printhead from dirt. The deposited colour film and humidity would prevent correct operation of the printheads. This way it is possible to plan a longer time between cleaning operations, more than double that of standard solutions.

Printing on double asynchronous rows

Printing on double asynchronous rows is possible on all Evolve machines thanks to an innovative software package that handles incoming tiles at two different times. This makes it possible to print two different designs, even on different tile sizes, and allows two lines to be set up to feed the same machine at different times and with different designs. To all intents and purposes, it is a double printer.

Possibility of loading different file formats

To maintain continuity with the past, the Evolve family can also load bitmap files (the format initially used on Keramagic machines) as well as Photoshop proprietary Psd and Psb formats which are capable of managing multichannel files with the use of more than 4 colours (up to 7). The Psb compression formats allow large size files to be processed. It is now possible to load very large images or designs running to dozens of metres in length.