Water-based or aqueous inks are prevalent on the desktop and
enjoy the advantage of being relatively inexpensive and environmentally
friendly, but penetration in industrial applications has been
slow for a variety of reasons.Water-based inks tend to require porous
or specially treated substrates or even lamination to impart durability
and the ink tends not to adhere to non-porous substrates.
Additionally, many piezoelectric industrial print heads are incompatible
with water-based ink formulations, although this is changing
in some part due to market demand for systems that can jet waterbased
biological or food contact fluids.