Bobst subsidiary Mouvent launched the TX802 textile printer at ITMA 2019. The heart of these printers is the modular printhead cluster, built around Fujifilm Dimatix Samba heads. Mouvent buys the heads alone without any of the electronics or plumbing normally supplied with a printhead to have it jet the ink when needed. Instead, Mouvent 3D-prints its own housing, which holds four Samba heads in a line complete with all the necessary ink lines and electronics.
The printers are capable of producing up to 1200 x 1200 dpi resolution with three drop sizes. They will take up to eight colours. The heads can lay down up to 16 grams per square metre. The company can produce most of the drops in one pass.
This means the machine has to be very precise to hide the lines that we would otherwise hide with the next few passes. It gives us very good detail in the image so we can print very fine lines.
The original TX801 was fitted with two clusters, meaning eight heads in total. The main difference with the new TX802 is that it has four clusters, or 16 heads, doubling the speed of the printer to 100 linear mpm. However, it’s not possible to upgrade the TX801 to the newer spec as there is additional hardware around the drying in the newer machine. Both of the Mouvent printers print a 1.8m wide image on substrates up to 1.82m wide, and can handle woven, non-woven and knitted materials including cotton, silk and lycra. Currently there are reactive and acid inks available.
Mouvent also introduced a new Digital Front End, Mouvent DFE, which covers preparation of print data and drives the printers.
