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LED Lighting for Exposure Emulsion T-shirt Printing
I would like to make an exposure unit to expose emulsion for t-shirt printing. I need some help - emulsion exposes at 400 nm and a 300W LED chip gives the shortest exposure time. I am not familiar with the LED strips I know some exposure units use them.
Our 365 nm UV LED strip lights have been a popular option for screen printing applications. I've included the product link below:
To replicate the 300 watts of LED power, we would recommend installing at least 65 feet of LED strip lights. This is based on our LED strip lights having a 4.5 watts per foot rating.
In our experience, unless this is a very large surface, you would not need such a high quantity of LED strip lights, especially if the LED strip lights are mounted close to the exposure surface.
Most photopolymer emulsions expose best at 380-400 nm. A 300-watt LED chip in the 385-405 nm range will expose in 10 seconds which is most desirable. Someone on a t-shirt forum posted using a 100-watt chip and exposure was 20-30 seconds 200-watt chip was 8-12 seconds. His recommendation was the 300-watt chip. I am assuming that was using a chip in the 385-405 nm wavelength.
The specifics of emulsion curing are beyond the scope of our product development, so we, unfortunately, do not have any data or estimates on curing times. That being said, we do frequently receive customer inquiries regarding the use of screen printing, so we do hope that some additional product literature and testing can be published for this application soon.
We do believe that one or two units of our realUV flex panel might be sufficient, and we would perhaps recommend testing and taking advantage of our free returns policy.
Question posted under:
Ultraviolet (curing, emulsion)UV-A LED strip lights
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