Improvement of color formulations in industrial printing by mixture design of experiments

Abstract

Printing on packages as per customer need in the case study revealed the problems at the stage of prototype inspection before production. The error was caused by the printing department, of which the printing plate system took too many materials and color production ingredients as not necessary. This resulted in high production cost. Also, there was neither data recording nor color adjustment to be in accordance with the company standard. Thus, this research aimed to improve color formations in industrial printing by mixture design. The factors to be studied were 2 new color formulations, i.e., Formulation 1: Pink, which included 9 ingredients; and Formulation 2: Purple, which included 3 ingredients. The experiment of each particular formulation was implemented as the amounts of ingredients for 3 formulations. Then, the results were analyzed by one-way ANOVA, with the significance level of 0.05. The ingredients of the 3 formulations were considered. It was found that the reduction of ingredients did not affect tone change. More specifically, the results of improvement revealed that the total amount of Formulation 1: Pink was 69.60 kg, which could reduce to 48.60 kg; with the cost reducing to 7,346 baht (42.30%). The total amount of Formulation 2: Purple was 29 kg, which could reduce to 17 kg; with the cost reducing to 3,498 (39.13%). Besides, the values obtained from these improved color formulations could be recorded as the standard values of the company for package printing in the future.