Another thing we've done is a special elastomer for use with water-based printing links. We think of ink as being almost benign, but sometimes it can be rather aggressive to certain materials, and swelling of the rubber typically causes a big problem in the dispensing valves for ink.
Peter Paul has worked with our existing rubber supplier on a specific material for ink that was originally developed for the rubber stamp industry and the automatic mailing label industry. If a rubber stamp were to swell up, lettering and logo would become distorted...so we've come up with a special material: We've developed an elastomer with customized nitrile rubber and very unique for the printing industry. We supply this in conventional plungers, disk compensated plungers and to media isolation diaphragms for ink dispensing and retrieval systems, some in high-speed ink jet printers.
Commercial ink jet printers do things like posters and large billboards. They fire all the ink jets at one time and deflect them so they have to pratically vacuum away the ink that isn't used. Some of these inks are magnetic so the media isolation valve is really the only way to control the flow of these inks. We found that while a number of diaphragm materials are useable, we picked a specific material for the water-based ink printer. It seems to mold well in existing tooling and is relatively ecomomical in cost, seeming to perform fairly well for the water-based inks. This product is currently available in Series 50 and 20 size in the diaphragm media isloation avlves.