UV Inks | Arkema Coating Materials

Arkema, through its Sartomer® product line, offers a comprehensive range of solutions to help you design UV ink and varnish formulations tailored to your specific needs—whether for pastes, liquids, inkjet inks, or overprint varnishes. Our portfolio supports a wide variety of applications, including laminating, offset, and screen inks, as well as solutions compliant with food packaging requirements.
We provide guidance in product selection, formulation strategies, and curing optimization to help you achieve the performance you expect from your inks.

Find Graphic Arts solutions

High performance UV-cure solutions for printing inks

We offer a complete portfolio of specialty acrylate resins and photoinitiators designed to meet the needs of all major UV printing technologies — including digital/inkjet, offset, flexo, screen, and overprint varnishes.

These solutions enable formulators to develop customized, high-performance inks featuring:
● Excellent adhesion across a wide range of substrates
● Flexibility for demanding applications
● High hardness for durable finishes
● Strong chemical resistance to enhance end-use performance

Capability to meet the challenges in diverse application fields

Our ink solutions and expertise address a variety of application-specific challenges, such as:

Creating UV/EB inks for use in structures like shrink-wrap and laminated packaging
Improving cured ink properties of UV flexo inks for flexible and thermoformable packaging
Developing UV/EB screen inks to decorate complex parts and rigid packaging
Formulating lower VOC UV and EB curable inks that allow printers to operate presses at speeds comparable to conventional inks
Offering inks that are both BPA-free and high performance for food packaging applications
Increasing the gelation stability of UV inkjet formulations at higher temperatures

Applications served:
Commercial print • Posters • Labels • Flexible packaging • Corrugated packaging • Food packaging • Direct-to-pack • Metal decoration • Printed circuit boards

Strong expertise and anticipation of evolving regulations and directives

Arkema strives to be at the forefront of the UV, UV LED and EB curable marketplace and our expert team look forward to discussing your ideas.

Comprehensive and personalized support to address REACH requirements
Compliance with influential brand owner’s requirements (such as BPA free, organotin free, PETIA free solutions)
Low migration range of products for food packaging applications, in compliance with the Swiss list, German Ink Ordinance and Nestlé guidance notes, with no risk of contamination and a very low potential for migration

Final formulations can be designed to meet a wide variety of performance properties.

Capability to meet the unique industry evolutions

Continued growth in markets such as UV labels and UV inks for flexible packaging

Seeking for adhesion on wide variety of substrates
Tendency for low filmweight materials
Digital printing moving towards industrial applications

Technical developments driven towards better curing response and lower viscosities

Analogue: combination of high reactivity and low shrinkage materials for flexo printing
Digital: inkjet printheads with smaller and smaller drop size for better print quality

A pioneer in the development of specialty acrylates for UV LED curing systems

As a pioneer in specialty acrylates for UV LED curing, Sartomer® solutions have been at the forefront of high-performance, energy-efficient solutions for the graphic arts industry. Our LED-optimized acrylates are engineered to match the narrow, high-intensity emission of UV LED lamps, enabling formulators to achieve fast curing, strong durability, and consistent print quality.

This expertise is strengthened by Arkema’s state-of-the-art Center of Excellence for Graphic Arts in Wetherby, UK — a key milestone in our commitment to advancing innovative and more sustainable UV/LED/EB solutions for printing, digital printing, and packaging.

With Sartomer® resins, you benefit from decades of photopolymer know-how and a portfolio designed to support the next generation of UV printing technologies.

GRAPHIC ARTS CENTER OF EXCELLENCE FOR PHOTOCURABLE TECHNOLOGIES