The Influence of Moisture and Wash Boarding on Corrugated Board Properties and Flexo-Printability: A Review

The global corrugated board packaging market is forecast to grow to 98 million tonnes in 2015 by a compound annual growth rate of 5% between 2010 and 2015. Despite the premier growth, inaccurate moisture control in corrugated board is posing a challenge to production system of whole corrugating industry. Moisture control is a critical issue in production and procession of corrugated boards. Being such a porous material, corrugated board can easily become too wet or dry wasting manufacturers crucial time, money and productivity. At one hand where too much water-content would cause boards to soften and submit to flute exposure after being produced, on other hand lack of water would make them to be crisp and easy to breakdown. The main objective of this study is to understand, analyse and predict various defects that might arise due to unbalanced moisture in the corrugated board such as washboarding and stripping in review of its manufacturing as well as flexographic printing.