From Lab to Fab: How Inkjet Earns Its Place on the Factory Floor

Inkjet has long promised to do for manufacturing what it once did for publishing: shorten lead times, personalise at scale, and move value from inventory to software. The reality on a production line, however, is less forgiving than a lab bench. Fluids warm up, viscosity drifts, substrates vary by batch, and the pristine test coupon turns into a complex 3D part that must pass adhesion tests and survive the weathering chamber. The distance between a neat prototype and a 24/7 process can be measured in pressure spikes, missing nozzles, and recall risk.

That gulf – from proof-of-concept to profitable production – is exactly where Inkatronic has staked its proposition. In a recent FuturePrint Podcast conversation, Inkatronic’s Mikael Boedler and my colleague Elena Knight explored what it really takes to move “from lab to fab,” and why so many promising applications stall at the pilot line. The lessons are pragmatic, repeatable, and increasingly urgent for manufacturers who see digital deposition as a route to differentiation rather than a curiosity.

In the lab, variables are controlled and time horizons are short. On the line, the physics compounds. Fluids heat up under duty cycle, viscosity and surface tension wander, ambient humidity knocks a delicate waveform off balance, and any weakness in pressure regulation or degassing shows up instantly as drop variation, density shift, or the bane of production managers everywhere – a creeping constellation of missing nozzles.

Boedler is blunt about the root cause: most failures trace back to the ink system, not the printhead. When heads are driven hard, pressure differentials ripple through the circuit. If recirculation, temperature control, filtration, and degassing are not engineered as a single, stable system, minor instabilities become major stoppages. Add to that a second frequent misstep – lab-grade fixtures in place of production-grade motion, curing, and monitoring – and a project can accumulate latent risk that only becomes visible at speed.

The corrective is simple in principle and hard in practice: design the R&D rig with the end state in mind. Use the same class of printhead, the same style of recirculating ink delivery, the same pre-treatment and curing physics, and a process window that reflects reality rather than hope. An R&D platform should be a miniature factory, not a showpiece that prints pretty coupons.

One discipline separates the programmes that scale from those that stall: substrate-first thinking. The best waveform cannot overcome poor wetting or weak adhesion. Surface preparation – cleaning, activation, or both – is where success begins. Inkatronic’s teams routinely profile surface energy, validate pre-treatments (plasma is often a lever), and only then move to ink selection. The order matters: choose ink for a prepared substrate, not a substrate for a fashionable ink.

With wetting and adhesion validated, printhead choice becomes an engineering decision, defined by standoff, resolution, throughput, and environment, and made in close cooperation with Inkatronic’s printhead partners to ensure the best match for the customer application. Inkatronic maintains a large bench of head technologies and qualifies them under real application loads. That neutrality simplifies a second scaling rule: characterise the process envelope in R&D exactly as you will run it in production. Define temperatures, viscosities, waveforms, passes, cure doses, and line speeds; then lock them. Good-looking samples are not the goal; a transferable process is.

A case study in digital leverage

Consider a manufacturer of coated metal scales for measurement instruments – a classic analogue domain. Screen printing delivered fine quality but crumbled under product proliferation. More SKUs meant more screens, slower changeovers, and rising costs. The target state was just-in-time variation without tooling – a digital problem.

The programme unfolded in disciplined steps. Surface energy on the coated metal proved low, so plasma pre-treatment was tuned to secure wetting and adhesion. Competing ink sets were tested for bond strength and durability. Printheads were selected against the required resolution and duty cycle. Multi-pass deposition, not single-pass, ultimately won on aesthetics – it delivered the matte finish the customer specified – and curing was optimised to that regime. All of this was executed on an R&D test station configured to mirror factory conditions.

Only when visual, adhesion, and stability criteria were met were parameters transferred, one-to-one, into a production architecture. The result: a machine designed, built, and commissioned in roughly five months, now two years into stable operation and producing more than 50,000 different layouts. The economic story is straightforward: digital’s flexibility unlocked customisation that analogue could not approach, without trading away repeatability.

Inkjet projects succeed when the ecosystem behaves like a single team. In practice that means the ink supplier, head manufacturer, integrator, and customer engineers work to a shared plan and data set. Problems are diagnosed at the system level – waveform, rheology, pressure and flow, electronics, motion, cure – rather than thrown over the fence. Boedler’s point is worth underlining: inkjet’s failure modes are well known and repeatable across projects; what varies is the speed and honesty with which they are surfaced and resolved.

That collaboration extends to metrology. Visual inspection is necessary but insufficient. Adhesion, chemical resistance, abrasion, UV/weathering – the battery of tests must be defined early and passed on R&D hardware before any talk of pilots. “Don’t wait for perfect” is sensible; “don’t test” is not.

If you are running an R&D programme with production in mind, three practical rules emerge from Inkatronic’s approach:

1. Start with the end in mind – Specify the production outcome first and build your R&D rig to that brief. Use industrial components, enforce production-like duty cycles, and measure what the factory will care about.
2. Treat surface preparation as a first-class process – If it doesn’t stick, it doesn’t ship. Optimise cleaning and activation up front and select ink to suit the prepared substrate.
3. Lock the process window early – Define and document every parameter you will transfer. Resist the temptation to chase the prettiest coupon at the expense of transferability.

Do those three things and you shorten time to revenue while reducing the risk of discovering physics at the customer’s site.

The philosophy is not theoretical. At FuturePrint Industrial Print in Munich on 21–22 January, Inkatronic will demonstrate a complete process live: digitally applying an insulative coating by inkjet onto complex 3D automotive parts using one of its R&D test stations – the same class of platform used to develop and de-risk customer processes. It is a neat encapsulation of the lab-to-fab mindset: show the real steps, on real hardware, under realistic constraints.

For tier-1 and tier-2 suppliers under pressure to accelerate development cycles, reduce inventory, and differentiate surfaces – functional and decorative – this matters. Digital deposition no longer competes with analogue solely on set-up economics; it unlocks design space that screen and spray cannot reach.

Two trends make the case for urgency. First, product variation is proliferating – by design, by region, by regulation. Tool-bound processes suffer as SKUs multiply. Second, the bar for reliability has risen. Quality systems and customer expectations leave little room for processes that only behave in demonstrations. Manufacturers want digital’s agility without sacrificing OEE.

Inkjet can meet that bar if it is treated as manufacturing, not magic. That means industrial ink systems, real process control, and sober acceptance that most “mystery issues” are pressure, temperature, or degassing by another name. It also means the humility to collaborate across chemistry, hardware, software, and operations.

The story Boedler tells is not of silver bullets but of disciplined engineering: define the substrate problem; pick heads for the job, not the catalogue cover; stabilise pressure and flow; validate in the lab exactly as you will run in the factory; and keep all the partners in one conversation. Do this and the time from promising coupon to productive cell compresses from years to months.

For an industry that thrives on precision, this is welcome news. Inkjet does not need to replace every analogue process to earn its keep. It simply needs to do what it does best – deliver variation without chaos, and capability without compromise – reliably, every shift.

For more information on Inkatronic please get in touch here

To see Mikael and his team in Munich in January 2026 please visit here to book your delegate space.

Please click on the image below to listen to the most recent podcast with Mikael Boedler.