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H o t S t A M P i n G
it‘s a Safe Bet you‘ll be Noticed
with its binder DeGAlAn®, evonik industries has made it more difficult to counterfeit the euro,
protects soccer fans from tricksters, and adds a quality touch to packaging. Because in an age
when one product can readily replace another, appearance means a great deal more than it ever
did before. if packaging or labels didn’t have their allure, today’s cosmetics, alcoholic beverages,
and sweets would hardly stand out in the crowd.
Creating additional appeal for products and packaging
is quite the trend—for brand-name and noname
products alike. In economically challenging
times, it’s particularly important to offer products
that are clearly distinguishable from the rest. Consumer
attention is a scarce and precious good. It’s vital, therefore,
for bottles, flacons, and other forms of packaging to feature
sophisticated designs that attract people’s attention. Evonik’s
expertise helps make products stand out in the crowd.
DEGALAN® is a methacrylate-based raw material used in
coatings. Marketed by the Coatings & Additives Business
Unit, DEGALAN® binder is added to coatings and inks to
achieve the desired effects on printed labels and packaging.
So how does a strikingly designed label actually end up
on a bottle of wine? How is lacy lettering printed on a box
of chocolates, or a gold cosmetic logo to an eyeliner stick?
The answer is by a process called hot stamping, which is a
special printing process. It involves first applying a negative
image to a polyester foil by means of multiple layers of a
coating, one on top of the other. For that image to be applied
to the product, the foil containing the layers is rotated by 180
degrees and then pressed onto the box, stick, or bottle with
a great deal of pressure and heat.
The combination of heat, pressure, and
the final adhesive layer on top of the
others detaches the coating system
from the foil and attaches it
to the intended surface.
The coat ing system
includes the design
layer,
often an additional layer of metal and a protective coating.
The adhesive ensures that the package sticks to the product
surface. A release layer embedded between the foil and the
coating helps to ensure that the polyester carrier foil and the
print layers can be peeled apart cleanly.
The great advantage of this method is that the various
layers can be printed on top of one another in a single-step
process. The special color effects, metallic effects, and hologram
imprints created in this way could not be produced
by applying multiple layers directly to a product surface.
“Unlike offset or digital printing,” explains Andreas Olschews
ki, global technical sales manager at Evonik’s Coatings
& Additives Business Unit, “this process allows for a
much broader spectrum of technologies, particularly for
products featuring high-end designs, exceptionally frag-
mented images, or designs with a metallic sheen.”
The results are impressive: The images produced are extremely
sharp and they are finely and clearly contoured.
DEGALAN® makes that possible. Because it is used as a cobin
der in the individual layers of the coating, it creates a
sharply contoured image and the color of that image is endowed
with added brilliance. Depending on the binders
used, however, it can do even more. This raw material improves
the film hardness of the protective coatings, making
them more resistant to high stamping temperatures. It can
also enhance the degree of adhesiveness of the image to the
target surface.
“This product,” says Olschewski, “has carved out an incredibly
successful market niche for itself. A lot of manufacturers
like using DEGALAN® binders because they always
produce excellent results.” Evonik’s customers include globally
operating businesses that provide hot-stamping technology.
The application spectrum is immense. Hot stamping
To protect banknotes against counterfeiting,
euro bills feature holograms that are difficult to
reproduce. These holograms are made using
the hot-stamping method, and Evonik supplies
DEGALAN® for use in that process
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