In an industry driven by continuous improvement, automotive manufacturers and their suppliers constantly seek new ways of ensuring quality, reducing production and warranty costs, and speeding assembly processes. By producing traceability codes, testing data, product information, and assembly identifiers on a wide range of parts, non-contact, ink jet coding technology effectively meets these, and other, specifications.
While it is necessary to identify an ink jet printer that has the hardware and software capabilities to properly integrate within the production line, it is often times the ink jet ink itself that determines the solution. This paper will review the primary automotive applications of ink jet coding, and highlight the fluid properties that support these specifications.