Contract Manufacturing of Aqueous Inks

Our production facility located in New Castle, DE has the largest aqueous inkjet ink capacity in the world. It was designed to meet the stringent requirements of highly technical inkjet products. We use novel technology and consider all critical parameters to ensure careful scale-up of inks which enable our customers to be successful.

Scale-Up

Our manufacturing principles are based on the "voice of the customer." We take pride in our strong relationships with our OEM customers, ensuring a thorough understanding of their requirements. We deliver customer support from concept through the entire product lifecycle.

We have the largest capacity in the industry for scale-up manufacturing. We are able to produce extremely large batches enabling our customers to benefit from economies of scale, coupled with rapid turnaround, and outstanding quality. The manufacturing assets can support simple to highly complex processes within a wide range of batch size, with an annual capacity of over 20 million liters.

When scaling up our customers' individual ink formulations we work closely with them in every aspect, from raw materials to specific process modifications required for their products. We have the capability to manufacture simple or complex inks, and always are prepared to implement new methods to satisfy particular requirements.

We conduct carbon treatment for organic impurity removal, and we also have facilities for ion exchange, reverse osmosis, and multiple options for sub-micron filtration. We are also a fine powder containment facility, consisting of large scale powder handling capability for textile dyes, allowing for easy handling. We have an in-house effluent control system, and bacterial control measures in place for inks and dyes, and conduct extensive unit operations for dye processing and purification. We maintain extremely strict biological controls on all products to ensure absolute purity.

Speed to Market

FFIC is sensitive to the importance of on-time delivery of a new commercial product into the market. Our highly experienced team of chemists and engineers work intimately with our OEM customers during the technical transfer of all toll products. The technical transfer team manages all critical activities with internal and external groups to ensure a smooth and rapid transfer and scale-up.

We deliver your ink formulations to market in rapid fashion, providing short development cycles to commercialization, with the lowest cost, and security of supply with dual sourcing and strategic alliances with critical suppliers. FFIC currently purchases an extensive range of inkjet raw materials and auxiliaries and can leverage existing relationships with our chemical partners to provide lowest cost options for our customers.

From the preliminary discussion of the formulation, we can provide an initial scale-up version within two weeks. We use advanced statistical tools, combined with a good understanding of our customers’ needs to quickly generate a workable tentative specification. We communicate constantly with customers to discuss all aspects of the scale-up. From an analytical perspective, critical tests are performed at every stage to ensure absolute downstream control, and this is aligned with all the customer's test sites as necessary. We ensure all regulatory requirements are fully met.

This process follows a well-defined method honed by over two decades of experience with large OEM companies with very high quality requirements.

Quality Assurance

As the supplier of inkjet products to the world leading inkjet OEMs with very high requirements, quality is an early consideration built into our design parameters. Raw materials are specially selected to develop the highest quality products with superior operability and reliability for excellent image quality, extended printhead life, and the highest product lot to lot consistency.

Manufacturing Process Control:

  • Detailed instructions and precise component weighing to ensure correct loading
  • Staging and verification of materials to 'bundle' for the ink formulation
  • Review by manufacturing to highlight any deviations and perform corrective actions

QC Lab Testing:

  • In-process and final analysis with internally developed and documented methods
  • Careful verification of data, methodology, calibration and equipment maintenance by QC for each batch analyzed

QA Review:

  • Review of manufacturing and QC data versus customer specification
  • Evaluation of normal trend by statistically calculated control limits
  • Comparison of final analysis data to specifications, generating a summary report used to confirm key parameters are within limits

Records Retention:

  • All data stored in batch records: in-process and final analytics, process logs, formulation verification and specification analysis
  • Batch records held on-site for minimum of three years
  • Data for raw materials, purified dyes and ink data are held indefinitely


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