Dan Fleming, III

Particle Size of Pigments for Soy Water Based Inks

Dipesh Sonar, Alexandra Pekarovicova, and Paul D. Fleming III, Western Michigan University;
Veronika Husovska, American Ink and Technology

Most of the commercially available water-based inks are formulated and manufactured using acrylic chemistry-based resins. Excluding from being nonrenewable, they are also non-biodegradable raw materials. Besides being used as resins for water based printing inks, they are used in various different applications, such as in prosthetic dentistry, automotive industry, medical devices, paints, storage tanks, metal buildings, rail car coatings, bridges, pipes, sealant/adhesive, paper and printing industries. Transparent coatings made of acrylics contain of about 20-25 weight % solids and do not meet the requirements of VOC regulations anymore. Therefore, these kinds of materials need to be replaced by some other alternatives that are natural water borne polymer systems, which was the motivation behind the present research. The aim of this work is to develop soy based pigment dispersions for water based inks to replace acrylic ones.

Dr. Fleming, professor, joined the Department of Chemical and Paper Engineering in 1996. He teaches courses in the graphic and printing science, chemical and paper engineering programs.

Dr. Fleming brings to Western over 22 years of industrial and almost 25 years academic experience. Prior to joining the faculty at Western Michigan University, Dr. Fleming was group leader in engineering design and analysis at the GenCorp Technology Center in Akron, Ohio. Previously, he held the position of Senior Research Specialist at Phillips Petroleum Research Center in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. He has held postdoctoral research associate positions in chemistry at Brown University and Columbia University. Dr. Fleming has over 350 publications and presentations to his credit and three U.S. patents.

Dr. Fleming has been involved with configuring and managing multiplatform computer networks. He has managed groups of industrial researchers and advised undergraduate and graduate students in academia. He has been involved in multidisciplinary research and consulting in industry and academia. His current research interests are surface chemistry, printed electronics, 3D printing, color management, paper coatings and whiteness measures. He is currently a co-director of the Center for Ink and Printability.