Abstract:
Methods and apparatus provide a means to rapidly develop and modify prototype surface coverings for customer review and approval, and fill the commercial pipeline while more conventional production equipment is obtained, installed and tested. The present apparatus to rapid prototype and fill the commercial pipeline includes a digital printing system to print a film and a press for laminating and embossing the printed film to a substrate. The press uses an embossing plate or roll, which is made from ebonite or by three-dimensional printing equipment. These plates and rolls can be produced within two or three days or less.

Description:
[0001]     This invention is directed to rapid prototyping and filling the commercial pipeline with printed and mechanically embossed surface coverings, particularly floor coverings.  
       BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION  
       [0002]     Developing new designs for surface coverings, by producing a prototype to show a potential customer prior to making a mass produced product available, is expensive and typically takes three months or more. This is mainly due to the cost and time to develop print cylinders and embossing cylinders.  
         [0003]     Customers are demanding shorter and shorter development times and more input into the final design of the product. It would be advantageous to have a means to quickly (within a matter of days) modify a design, produce a prototype that will faithfully imitate the final product, and be capable of producing commercial quantities of the final product at a rate to meet initial commercial demand.  
         [0004]     Current methods of prototyping surface covering are expensive, because each change in design requires the rotogravure printing cylinder and the standard embossing roll to be re-etched or re-engraved. If the surface covering is chemically embossed, any change in the chemical embossing also requires re-etching or re-engraving of the print cylinder. The process of remaking the cylinders is expensive and time consuming.  
       SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION  
       [0005]     The present invention overcomes this disadvantage by using digital printing to make rapid changes in the print pattern and chemical embossing pattern. The chemical embossing pattern is created by printing a blowing agent modifier, such as a blowing inhibitor or a blowing accelerator.  
         [0006]     The present invention also uses mechanical embossing tools that can be produced within two or three days. The embossed plates used in a stacker press are cheaper and quicker to make than the traditional mechanical embossing rolls used in the typical manufacture of tile and sheet goods. Ebonite embossing cylinders and embossing plates, and cylinders and plates made by three-dimensional printing equipment can also be made within two or three days. Therefore, the rapid prototyping of the surface covering required by the present invention is achieved.  
         [0007]     Further, time to market is significantly shortened by using the digital printing system, stacker press, ebonite mechanical embossing cylinders and plates, or mechanical embossing cylinders and plates made by three-dimensional printing equipment to fill the commercial product pipeline. While the pipeline is being filled, the traditional rotogravure printing cylinders and mechanical embossing rolls can be made, and the less expensive to manufacture production line, which includes the rotogravure printing cylinders and mechanical embossing rolls, can be set up. Once the rotogravure printing and mechanical embossing line is up and running, the digital printing system and stacker press, ebonite embossing rolls or three-dimensional printing rolls may be used to develop another new tile or sheet goods.  
         [0008]     In a preferred embodiment, the prototypes and commercial product which fills the commercial pipeline uses a digital printing system and an embossing system in which the embossing tool can be made within two or three days. The digital printing system permits rapid and flexible changing of the prototype design.  
         [0009]     While the prototyping embossing systems that are envisioned produce tile at a slower rate than typical tile manufacturing lines and do not use an embossing tool having a long commercial production lifespan, the tools can be made within two or three days and are durable enough to make enough commercial product to fill the commercial pipeline and permit time to manufacture and install the standard commercial embossing tools. 
     
    
     DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE INVENTION  
       [0010]     One purpose of this invention is to enable the user to rapidly prototype and/or manufacture vinyl tiles, either the standard residential type D.I.Y. vinyl tiles or luxury vinyl tiles; sheet goods, including residential and commercial resilient flooring; and other surface coverings, particularly those that are printed and mechanically embossed. Currently, the manufacturing process utilized to develop and produce vinyl tile and sheet goods can take as long as 90 days. The present invention will significantly reduce the cycle-time to produce such vinyl tiles and sheet goods to as short as one week or less, thereby giving the user a significant marketplace advantage.  
         [0011]     Flexography is an offset technique where the printing plates or cylinders are made from rubber or photopolymers. The printing has been accomplished by the transfer of ink from the raised surface of the printing plate to the surface of the material being printed. The rotogravure method of printing uses a print cylinder with thousands of tiny cells which are below the surface of the printing cylinder. The ink is transferred from the cells when the print cylinder is brought into contact with the media at the impression roll. Printing inks for flexography or rotogravure include solvent based inks, water based inks, and radiation cured inks. While rotogravure and flexography printing does provide acceptable image quality, these two printing methods require expensive and time-consuming preparation of print cylinders or printing plates which make printing jobs of less than 100,000 units expensive as the setup cost and the cost of the cylinders or printing plates is typically depreciated over the size of the print job. Analog printing includes rotogravure printing and flexographic printing, as well as transfer printing.  
         [0012]     Recently, digital printing has become a viable method for the printing of information on packages. The term “digital printing” refers to the electronic digital characters or electronic digital images that can be printed by an electronic output device capable of translating digital information. The two main digital printing technologies are ink jet and electrophotography.  
         [0013]     The introduction of piezo impulse drop-on-demand (DOD) and thermal DOD ink jet printers in the early 1980&#39;s provided ink jet printing systems. These early printers were very slow, and the ink jet nozzles often clogged. In the 1990&#39;s Hewlett Packard introduced the first monochrome ink jet printer, and shortly thereafter, the introduction of color, wide format ink jet printers enabled businesses to enter the graphic arts market. Today, a number of different ink jet technologies are being used for packaging, desktop, industrial, commercial, photographic, and textile applications.  
         [0014]     In piezo technology, a piezo crystal is electrically excited to create pressure waves, which eject ink from the ink chamber. The ink can be electrically charged and deflected in a potential field, allowing the different characters to be created. More recent developments have introduced DOD multiple jets that utilize conductive piezo ceramic material which, when charged, increases the pressure in the channel and forces a drop of ink from the end of the nozzle. This allows for very small droplets of ink to form and be delivered at high speed at very high resolution, approximately 1,000 dpi printing.  
         [0015]     Until recently, the use of color pigments in jet inks was uncommon. However, this is changing rapidly. Submicron pigments were developed in Japan for ink jet applications. Use of pigments allows for more temperature resistant inks required for thermal ink jet printers and laminations. Pigmented water-based jet inks and UV-curable jet inks are commercially available. Pigmented inks have greater light fastness and water-resistance.  
         [0016]     Digital ink jet printing has the potential to revolutionize the printing industry by making short-run, color print jobs more economical. However, the next commercial stage will require significant improvements in ink jet technology; the major hurdle remaining is to improve print speed. Part of this problem is the limitation of the amount of data the printer can handle rapidly. The more complex the design, the slower the printing process. Right now they are slower than comparable digital electrostatic printers.  
         [0017]     In one embodiment, a vinyl film, opaque white or optically clear is either surface printed or reverse printed utilizing a high speed linear array digital printing system such as the Dotrix™ Digital Print Factory or similar digital printing system. This is proven technology and has a high mathematical correlation on the LAB color scale to visuals produced with industry standard rotogravure methodology and inks.  
         [0018]     The key advantage to the digital printing system is significantly reduced cycle time due to digital direct to substrate or film printing versus having to engrave printing cylinders for rotogravure printing and then using standard rotogravure printing methods to print the substrate or film. Also, changeover times of the manufacturing process using digital printing is instantaneous and, the range of visuals that can be produced is constrained only by the density of the ink jet arrays and memory storage capacity of the CPU&#39;s running the digital print engine.  
         [0019]     In one embodiment, the printed vinyl film is cut to size using an appropriate cutting machine. The cut to size film is then fed into a stacker press which uses heat and pressure for an appropriate amount of time to consolidate or laminate the printed film layer to an upper surface wear layer film and a lower surface vinyl base layer. In the stacker press, multiple embossing plates simultaneously emboss and laminate or consolidate multiple tiles.  
         [0020]     The construction of the vinyl tile consists of, but is not limited to an upper optically clear wear layer, a digitally surface printed white film or an optically clear reverse printed film, and a pre-extruded and calendared PVC base layer. The stacker press utilized in the manufacture of this vinyl tile can utilize a laser triangulation registration system. The embossing plates are used as the upper platens in the stacker press.  
         [0021]     After the stacker pressing operation, the material is sent to a high speed cutter, which can be either an ultrasonic or a standard knife based punch press, where the vinyl tiles are cut to the specified dimensions for the finished product. If required, the vinyl tile can be subsequently processed for various visual enhancements such as, but not limited to, beveled or decorative edges. As a final step, the vinyl tile can be back coated with a self-stick adhesive and a release paper applied using industry standard coating methods.  
         [0022]     The stacker press is used in China. While labor intensive, it permits the use of a plurality of embossing plates that can be engraved within two or three days or less. The press is filled with multiple surface covering substrates, including print layers and wear layers. These multiple surface covering substrates are simultaneously embossed and laminated.  
         [0023]     As shown in Vaughn et al. U.S. Pat. No. 6,846,172 (Vaughn) and Betti et al. U.S. patent application Publication No. US 2005/0020422 (Betti), both of which are incorporated by reference, it is known to form embossing rolls using ebonite as the embossing surface. Ebonite is a hard, moldable rubber with more than 20 percent of its weight being sulfur. Neither Vaughn nor Betti suggest that the ebonite embossing roll can be manufactured within two or three days, or that such a roll has a lifespan considerably less than standard embossing rolls that are preferred for the embossing of surface coverings.  
         [0024]     The embossing rolls can also be made by free form fabrication or three-dimensional printing. These methods have been predominantly employed in the field of rapid tool making to create tools and dies, either directly by printing a binder onto a metal powder, followed by sintering and infiltration, or indirectly by using rapid prototyping to create a pattern to form the tool by using stereolithography followed by investment casting.  
         [0025]     In outline, three-dimensional printing uses additive processes to create a physical geometry directly from a CAD file. The predominant three-dimensional printing technologies include stereolithography, selective laser sintering, three-dimensional printing to print starch, ABS rubber, plastic or other materials, fused deposition modeling, laminated object manufacturing, and the solider process. As used herein, the term “three-dimensional printing” is intended to include all of the above-mentioned technologies.  
         [0026]     In the technique of stereolithography, fluid photosensitive resins are solidified by exposure to ultraviolet laser illumination. Selective laser sintering uses the laser-induced fusion of a polymer or polymer-coated powder.  
         [0027]     Three-dimensional printing uses an ink-jet to print binder onto a powder. Fused deposition modeling involves the extrusion of a thermoplastic material. In laminated object manufacturing, sheets of paper are cut by a laser beam. The solider technique uses ultraviolet light to cure one layer of photosensitive resin at a time as opposed to other stereolithographic techniques that treat one point in a layer at a time.  
         [0028]     Three-dimensional printing permits the rolls to be made by in two or three days or less. However, the embossing rolls formed by three-dimensional printing have a relatively short lifespan, particularly when compared with standard embossing rolls.  
         [0029]     The manufacturing process outlined above will allow the user to rapidly develop and produce vinyl tiles, sheet goods and other surface coverings having unique visual characteristics. This will allow the user to display prototype goods to potential customers more rapidly. If approved by the customer, the goods can be manufactured using the process to fill the commercial pipeline while more commercially and economically viable processes are set up to continue the commercial manufacture of the goods.