The Surface Energy of Materials

Why are some packaging materials easier to print than others?
Why do labels stick to some products but not to others?
It's all because of the surface energy of the materials in question. 
Read more here: https://packagingnews.net/what-is-surface-energy-of-materials-why-does-it-matter/

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Surface Energy
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[00:00:00] Today's video is on one of the most interesting topics in packaging today, the surface energy of materials. You may be wondering, what on earth that is? So being a trendy, up to date kind of person, I asked the new AI program, DeepSeek, what it meant, and could it please tell me in one sentence.

Mr. DeepSeek came back with the following.

Surface energy of materials is the excess energy at the surface of a material compared to its bulk, resulting from the asymmetric bonding environment of surface atoms. Okay, I might have been kidding when I said this was one of the most interesting topics, but what does it mean? Well, here's an example of surface energy in action.

Imagine You've just waxed and polished your car. It's looking [00:01:00] beautiful and shiny and what happens? Yep, it rains. But the rain, other than making your nice clean car dirty again, doesn't evenly wet the surface.

It basically beads up into globules. Very interesting effect, and it shows you've done a good job. And that's actually an example of low surface energy in action. The same thing can happen with inks and adhesives in packaging. Why do some materials not print easily? Why does a label not stick to the bottle it's supposed to?

You guessed it. It's down to surface energy, and it's because the surface energy is lower than it needs to be to work.

Some packaging materials have high surface energy naturally, making them easy to print on and to stick things to. I'm thinking of things like paper. PET, [00:02:00] the corrugated materials that we use for making shipping cases and trays. Others, on the other hand, some plastics in particular that are used in packaging, not so much.

They have low surface energy, making it difficult to print on them and to get things to adhere to them. If your material doesn't work the way that you want it to, there are treatments available that can probably help. Things like corona systems or plasma systems can help increase the surface energy of your materials.

Sometimes only on a temporary basis, but it might be enough for what you need to do. I've written an article on this topic over at Packaging News Net I'll leave a link to it. Thank you very much, and I hope your surface energy is good today.