FuturePrint Podcast
FuturePrint is dedicated to and passionate about the power of print technology to enable new opportunities and create new value. This pod features deep-dive discussions with the people behind the tech as well as market analysis, trends, marketing and storytelling!
FuturePrint Podcast
#252 - Drying Differently: How RF Technology Can Revolutionise Digital Print for Packaging
In this episode, we speak with Dr Peter Brown and Rowan Beale from 42 Technology, a FuturePrint partner that may have cracked one of digital print’s most stubborn challenges: how to efficiently dry aqueous inks—without compromising substrates or sustainability goals.
Their RF dielectric drying technology delivers up to 75% energy efficiency, compared to just 5–15% with traditional drying methods such as hot air and near-infrared. Even more compelling, it enables high-quality aqueous ink printing on previously unsuitable materials like plastic films—opening new commercial possibilities for packaging and beyond.
🔍 Key Highlights:
Targeted Energy Use: RF dielectric drying heats only the ink—not the substrate or surrounding materials—making it highly efficient.
Consistent Results Across Colours: Unlike infrared drying, RF drying is colour-independent, eliminating issues with uneven drying times.
Aqueous Ink Momentum: With growing regulatory pressure and sustainability demands, aqueous inks are on the rise—but traditional drying has held them back. Until now.
Efficiency Gains: Hot air offers ~5% efficiency; near-IR ~15%. RF drying reaches up to 75%, significantly reducing energy costs.
Technical Breakthroughs: 42 Technology overcame major design challenges—including electrode development—to deliver a compact, cost-effective solution.
Challenging Industry Myths: The team proves that RF drying does work for thin ink films, overturning longstanding assumptions.
Broader Potential: Beyond print, applications include food industry moisture removal and medical microfluidic heating.
Looking Ahead: 42 Technology is now seeking development partners to help scale and commercialise this proven innovation.
This story also highlights how cross-industry expertise and unconventional thinking can unlock new solutions to persistent problems.
👉 Interested in partnership opportunities?
Visit 42technology.com and email Peter peter.brown@42t.com or Rowan rowan.beale@42t.com
Listen on:
Apple Podcast
Google Podcast
Spotify
What is FuturePrint?
FuturePrint is a digital and in person platform and community dedicated to future print technology. Over 15,000 people per month read our articles, listen to our podcasts, view our TV features, click on our e-newsletters and attend our in-person and virtual events.
We hope to see you at one of our future in-person events:
FuturePrint TECH: Industrial Print: 21-22 January '26, Munich, Germany
Welcome to the latest episode of the Futureprint Podcast. Marcus Timpson here Really happy to have with me two gentlemen from a really cool business based in St Ives in Cambridgeshire, close to Cambridge 42 Technology. I have with me today Rowan Beale and Dr Peter Brown. Welcome to the podcast, gentlemen.
Speaker 1:Thank you Good morning to the podcast. Gentlemen, thank you Good morning, really happy to have you with us. We have an exciting topic to talk about today, and one that these gentlemen will explain very well, I'm sure. Exciting, because actually, it's potentially game-changing, and this is the exciting thing about innovation, isn't it? It's sort of the potential we're going to discover throughout the discussion. What we're going to discover throughout the discussion. What we're going to start by doing, though, is obviously introducing yourselves, guys, so that a bit of your backgrounds would be useful, and also a bit about 42 Technology, because, as a Futureprint partner, you're technical, but you do things in a different way. Explaining a bit about the business, I think, to people, is really useful, so Rowan.
Speaker 3:Yeah, let me give a quick introduction then. So I'm Rowan. I've been with Fortis UT for just over 10 years now. My background was physics. I started off as a systems engineer, kind of progressively worked through various products in various industries and taken on a lot more of a technical project management role within the company. Now, Most recently, I've been working on the RF internal capability demonstrator project that we're going to talk more about in this podcast. Yeah, I'm really excited to be able to talk through what we've been up to.
Speaker 1:Fantastic, looking forward to it. Peter, I know you're more of a perhaps traditional face to 42 technology and future, but yeah, a bit of background for yourself and a bit about 42 technology.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thanks, marcus, it's nice to speak to you again. So, peter Brown, chief commercial officer now at 42 Technology that's a change since we last did a podcast. I'm a physicist by training, with a PhD in semiconducting polymers from Cambridge University, but I've been in technology consultancy all my career since 2002, starting off as a lab rat and now 100% commercial and client-facing work with responsibility for all the sales at 42T. I probably spent two-thirds to three-quarters of my career in digital printing and coating in one way or another. I used to work on tone jets.
Speaker 2:For those of you with a long memory, I was working on a piezo, so based inkjet technology at ttp that could do high viscosity inks and large particles a long time before it was a a gleam in czar's eyes. Um, I've been working on recently with 42t. We've not been developing new inkjet technologies, but we're definitely part of the ecosystem to help people push inkjet into new applications or to solve longstanding problems, with very much a focus on things like drying and curing, which I know we're about to talk about, but equally helping to solve problems with installed units, helping to guide customers into how to get into inkjet printing and so on and so forth.
Speaker 1:Fantastic and 42 Technology. A bit about the concept behind the business and what it is you do for the wider clients and so on.
Speaker 2:So we're one of the classical Cambridge Shire technical consultancies. We're a bit smaller than the likes of your TTP and PAs we're about 80 people but we come from a very wrong mechanical engineering background. We've been around about 25 years and that's absolutely been the core of our business ever since. In the last 15 years we've added considerable expertise in electronics and software and design engineering and so on and and they've even let the odd applied a physicist into the room row and escape into electronics. But I've kind of stayed in the physics side of things and we work across a very broad range of industries.
Speaker 2:Printing and packaging is absolutely one of our core areas, but we also do a ton in instrumentation and sensing, lots in communications, lots in energy particularly renewable energy, consumer and personal care, food and beverage, med tech, diagnostics, medical devices. So it's a really broad range of things and actually that's one of the things we do really well. We work across so many industries that when a client has a problem in one industry that we think has been solved somewhere else, we can pick up that solution and develop it and stick it into a new area which our clients find very valuable. So we are generalists that specialize in a few areas but with a very broad range of capabilities, depending on the staff and the colleagues that we have here.
Speaker 1:Fantastic, like you say, it gives you the ability to see lots of different patterns and threads and solutions and ideas and you've got that distance, but then that capacity to help people solve these problems and bring new ideas to life right.
Speaker 2:That's absolutely right, and whilst we're a very hands-on company we've got our own labs here the end product of that we really like to do is a new product or an upgraded product or a new machine or a new process or something like that. But to start off all those projects, people come to us for insights and strategy where we might do some road mapping, we might do some front-end innovation, we might do some structured innovation. It's thought leadership, like coming to FuturePrint and giving our views on where we see technology is going or where we think the technology blockers are. That kind of work will also kick off the development programs. That is our bread and butter.
Speaker 1:All right, fantastic. Now, moving on to the specific area that we've already hinted at curing. So, rowan, could you explain to us, perhaps, what is rf, dielectric drying, and how does it differ in a way to conventional drying methods currently used in print and packaging? Because this is the exciting, game-changing potential technology, isn't it?
Speaker 3:and that's it go for it yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:So this is, this is the new technology we're trying to bring in.
Speaker 3:So conventionally at the moment you've got kind of hot air, you've got IR, you've got UV curing of different inks, but with the move to aqueous inks you've got the need to be able to put in a lot of energy to be able to evaporate the water and dry the different inks on your substrate. So what we've got is looking at dielectric heating to be able to really focus the energy into the actual aps ink itself, to to improve the efficiency of the whole drying mechanism without heating everything else around it at the same time. So with hot air, with ir, you run the risk you'll be able to heat up the substrate and everything else in the the area, whereas this is much more targeted and focused. That's really one of the big game changes that this is bringing um, but it is challenging um. So we had kind of set up to be able to prove that this is something that is feasible. There's not many people out there doing it at the moment and really we wanted to show the benefits that could be brought along with that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you've already recorded and explained as showing it in action, which we'll link to in the notes of this podcast because it's real and it's proven. Really, isn't it, and you kind of mentioned it there? What specific challenges in industrial digital printing perhaps, such as drying speed, substrate limitations or even energy use? What does this technology really help solve? The exciting value of it? I guess, I don't know, peter or Rowan explain.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think the first thing. We first came at this from an energy angle. We know that hot air drying is about 5% efficient from an energy point of view, largely because you spend huge amounts of energy heating air, but most of that air doesn't go anywhere near the substrate and that's before you get to the problems of heat transfer from the air to the substrate and to the ink. But hot air is really low capex, it's very easy to make and it's been used for decades. And then near-infrared drying came along with the promise of higher efficiencies, and it is. But you do a few calculations and you do a few measurements and it comes out to about 15% efficient for a lot of applications. And we know from our work on a different project that RF drying can really be as much as 75 percent efficient. There's nothing to stop that really. So when we had the energy crisis a few years ago post-COVID and everything was getting expensive a few years ago post-COVID and everything was getting expensive, I was already thinking that there's an opportunity for a new tech here to come in and help people out, particularly if you're looking at the massive installations like for Corrugated. There's hundreds of kilowatts of heating going on there, you need an entirely new substation built out the back of your plant. If you're going to install one of these giant machines, then when we dug into it a bit more, you find out that near-infrared is very colour dependent. It can dry black ink really well, but your yellow will take much longer to dry. In fact, by the time you started drying the yellow, the black has got so hot it can be damaging the substrate if you're not very careful. So that's a challenge. So when we started to realize that RF had the potential not only to be more energy efficient and, as Rowan said, it wouldn't heat the substrate and it would be color independent and it's drying, you're starting to add up to addressing an awful lot of the challenges that the printing industry has been wrestling with for years, and for a long time we just went well, live with it. We're just going to have to figure out the best compromise and go there.
Speaker 2:And then, with the advanced, you know, there's R coming out with the Aquanox head and Dymatics, producing heads that can print water-based ink. They're starting to push industrial printing into an area that was the premise and stole domain of the likes of HP or Epson and Cammon. So here we are now. We've got aqueous inks in industrial printing, really looking to push on. But the incumbents are very energy inefficient. They don't dry different colors very easily. They can damage substrates, particular plastic films. The concept of printing water-based inks onto plastic films is completely unheard of. It's a complete no-no. But I reckon RF drying has the potential to absolutely blow that wide open. Now that is exciting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you've mentioned a few times Roman. You did too there exactly that Equus Inks clearly are gaining traction, aren't they in the market, and particularly in the packaging sphere? Because of that's, I guess, the opportunity that's so exciting as well commercially. Equus Inks have obviously got that sustainability link. Obviously, there are regulatory drivers coming. Why are they so, robin? Perhaps you can explain why are they so challenging in digital print and why does RF drying help overcome those challenges?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I mean with classical kind of solvent-based inks, obviously, with enough time they evaporate off and dry relatively quickly. The problem that you've got with aqueous ink is you've got to put so much energy into those droplets to be able to evaporate them off and dry them. The typical methods at the moment aren't preferable. I mean, you've got to heat up the ink and the substrate for a long period of time before you've actually got it dry enough to be able to to do anything with. So rf, if you can target and focus the heating into the aqueous ink, you can heat up. You can dry it out much quicker than using conventional methods.
Speaker 1:Um, it's just something that solvent and your uv curing inks don't suffer from at the moment right and um, so, so, really, at the stage right now, you've proven the concept, you've shared it. People are starting to kind of perhaps I think you said before seeing is believing right so you've taken the concept, proving it works, and people are starting to go, wow, this is interesting. Um, and this is exciting, how do we develop this? So, if someone's listening and excited by it and perhaps are excited by the commercial potential as well, how does 42t, how do you as a business, really work with them? You're looking to partners. How are you going to develop it, co-develop it, scale it? What, what's? What's your thinking next? I know that you've already got quite a lot of interest, haven't you?
Speaker 2:yeah, marcus, thanks, but 42t's business model is very simple it's fees for time. With that time we do really really high value add stuff for our clients. We people wouldn't come to us if we weren't adding that value and and in some cases it's entire business creation. So for us here, what we are looking for is someone who recognizes that RF drying could be a huge enabler for their business and pays us to develop the technology for them. That's the basic business model. Of course, we've seeded this with our own funding internally to come up with a demonstrator that that you, you've been kind enough to publicize through through your own, your own videos. Um, the next step is for people to uh pick up the, the reins, as it were, and give not just the funding but the, the market pool. So let's stop with technology push, let's get market pool involved, and then it becomes unstoppable.
Speaker 2:So we are talking to people who you would readily recognize as leaders in ink manufacturing. You can imagine if an ink company is telling the world that they're going to be number one or one of the world's leaders in aqueous inks. For inkjet, not being able to dry your inks is a barrier to you selling lots of inks. So they're interested. We've got people who are printer suppliers and manufacturers interested. We've got people who are printhead manufacturers, who are printer suppliers and manufacturers interested. We've got people who are printhead manufacturers who are interested, and I'm not going to give away names, but it's not just your classic drop-on-demand inkjet printhead manufacturers that are interested. So there's a whole range of people who are interested in taking this forward and we're open to conversations with anyone and everyone who might be interested in that.
Speaker 1:But that's what we're looking for a development partner to pay us to develop it so that they can commercialize it and get many, many times the return on the investment you know, many, many times the return on the investment, yeah, and so packaging is an enormous industry, of course, and you've mentioned there that it's the challenge of, of that is is significant. Um, is packaging the main focus for you guys? Are you thinking this, is it? Or is there other industries, rowan, I don't know, is it?
Speaker 3:yeah, yeah, I mean, this started with looking at packaging, so it started with us trying to understand how better can you dry out these inks.
Speaker 3:But I think that there are probably a number of other markets and areas that rf drying and heating would be very valuable. I mean, there is obviously the food industry. Being able to remove moisture from products after it's been baked would be very helpful. And then I think there are a lot of other situations where you want to be able to heat up, maybe aqueous based solutions with a non-contact method. So even I can imagine in the medical industry, where you've got microfluidics samples that you that you don't want to contact or you don't want to be blowing hot air or anything that could can contaminate samples um, the rf drying again would be another really nice application for that solution. So I think as we develop and we see you know how well it works, the efficiency, the amount of areas that it will be useful in and used in will grow quite substantially. But yeah, at the moment we've been very much focused on packaging, heating, heating inks on printed substrates.
Speaker 1:Makes a lot of sense yeah, and it's no mean feat, is it? I mean because it's really like you mentioned paradigm before that many people probably have said to you or might have assumed that not possible, you can't do this right. I mean, um, what were the key hurdles technical, business, related you faced in developing or trying to bring this idea to life? What, what kind of hurdles, and how do you address them? I don't know if people or rome would like to answer yeah, I mean there's been a lot of hurdles.
Speaker 3:I mean one of them is being cost and size of the solution. So at the moment you've got a lot of the the rf heating uh examples that are out there use very large vacuum-based uh components. They're very expensive. They have risks associated associated with them so they could give off things like x-rays and whatnot. What we've done is move away from that and try to get a much smaller, cheaper solution that uses solid-state electronics for RF drying. So that's been a significant hurdle.
Speaker 3:The other thing is very much around electrode design. So how do you efficiently couple your field into the sample that you're trying to heat? And there is a lot of development and challenges around that, as well as the fact that your sample, as you're heating it and you're starting to dry it, its properties are changing throughout that process. So as you remove moisture, as the humidity increases, as the different materials come in, you know couple into your electrodes. All of those properties are continually changing and that puts a lot of challenges on the way that you design your driver circuit to be efficient and resilient as well to those changes and resilient as well to those changes. So there's been a lot of technical challenges that we've had to already overcome, to demonstrate, even on a small scale, the trying that we've done.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and often, I guess also that's really interesting to hear that you've solved those and you've moved on. But also, I guess there's a sense to which every industry falls into a set of rules, doesn't it? And kind of well, this is what we do, because we do it, and then what you're doing is challenging thinking as well as anything else, isn't it? Peter?
Speaker 2:Yes, very much. So. People have been fixed on hot air and infrared drying for a very long time now. And to come in and say, well, actually there's something new. You've got to affect the way people think about things and there's a whole inertia there that you need to turn around. And human beings are human beings. Some people, a small number of people, will go, wow, that's amazing, really quickly. But that's not enough. You've got to convert the rapid followers and then the people who are a bit more conservative, who just stay where they are. You've got to convince all those people in order to get a new technology off the ground. But seeing is believing and the demonstrator has really helped with that.
Speaker 2:Um, but it's also fair to say that there's been, uh, part of our conversations and part of our work. We've uncovered a general pervasive thinking within the industry that rf drying simply will never work for, uh, for thin films of ink, whether it's been digitally deposited or analog, or if it's a coating or an image. People have looked at RF in the past. Perhaps with the technology that's available today, which is all vacuum tubes and gigantic machines that run at tens of kilowatts, I said, oh, it doesn't work very well and I don't think the RFf industry as it currently is has helped itself, because when they talk about how the physics of these things work, quite often they're just wrong. They're just flat out wrong, um, and so a lot of the work that row and I and the rest of the team have done is that we've uncovered why people think it doesn't work and also why it does. But ultimately our demonstrators are showing it working and it's a long way from optimized and it knocks a few of those sacred cows on the head and says, well, actually it does work, but now you've got to explain to me why we're wrong when actually it's working there. So it's been interesting, very interesting, and it's been interesting, very interesting.
Speaker 2:And Rowan and I we've been in the technology development game for a long time. We've all seen projects come and go and we've seen successful ones and we've seen ones that didn't quite work. It is very rare for the both of us to stand there in the lab and look at this thing working going. Wow, I can really, really really see this being scalable and working. Um, already, with the first demonstrator you ever make. Usually, when you look at something, you, when you have your first demonstrator made for a new tech say oh, I don't know it's a, it's a bit sensitive and it's a.
Speaker 2:It doesn't really quite work at the same right order of magnitude we're looking for and you know we're just oh, I don't know it's a bit sensitive and it doesn't really quite work at the same right order of magnitude we're looking for and you know we're just oh, we've got our work cut out here. We're just looking at this and going to work Not optimised, but we know how it works. This we can do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's really exciting. I think we talked before and you mentioned this thing called. Is it called the God gap? That's a really nice concept about people. You can't explain things, so you just think it's not possible or you accept things as they are. What's that concept?
Speaker 2:You put me on the spot now, marcus. I tell you it comes back to the theory of the God of the gap. It comes back to the theory of the god of the gap that some people will say that religion can only explain things that we don't understand right now. But as science progresses and we can explain more and more about how the world that works us works, therefore, what you can attribute to a deity is less and less and less. That was that theory and there's almost a case of here that with a new technology, what you think is impossible and cannot be done is continuously being challenged as a new technology comes along and enhances what you can do in the world. And I think frankly some people are resistant to change like that because it challenges what they think about the world. Some people embrace it, of course and others find it difficult.
Speaker 2:This is a more philosophical discussion about, uh, new technology and how you introduce it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's also human psychology, isn't it? We're programmed to stay safe, so you know, things that challenge that sense of safety sometimes are a bit, but what you're saying is you're removing that sense because you're proving it works, and actually it's about the ones now taking that opportunity forward, getting out there and doing something really cool with it yeah, adopting any new technology in any field is risky.
Speaker 2:Um, and I have the utmost respect for the people who say I believe in the opportunity, I believe in the technology and I believe in the people who develop this technology and to put their own money into it. I mean the people that do that I have a huge amount of respect for and, of course, I spend my whole career trying to find those people and to become friends with them and it's never done easily. But the people that do that the people that take those risks.
Speaker 1:They're the ones that change the world. Yeah, absolutely, and so it's super exciting. So, looking ahead now from here, we already made huge progress and so on. Um, what next for um, rf drying and 42t, any sort of targets, market moves or what you're what. What next for you guys with this?
Speaker 3:um, there's definitely some more technical challenges that would be really nice to overcome.
Speaker 3:I mean, we've had some huge successes already.
Speaker 3:I mean, when we started this whole program, we were concerned that you know to be able to dry efficiently with the kind of typical um image I guess that you have of dielectric heating is these two plates that sit very close to each other.
Speaker 3:But we've had some huge success in being able to move away from that kind of difficult electrode design that would have been difficult to implement in its final configuration. So there are a few more challenges that we would like to address around being able to heat up smaller droplet sizes, or even around kind of how you might be able to use RF heating to be able to dry out 3D structures as well. So there's definitely some other areas to explore and take forward. But essentially we're really keen to partner up with people now and be able to develop a solution for their application and just see how far we can push it all. We're confident that the physics works as as expected. So, yeah, we want to turn it into a much bigger product and take it forward fantastic and peter, so, um, both of you, really someone's listening to this.
Speaker 1:They're like, wow, this is interesting. This is, how do they connect with you guys? How are you gonna, you know, perhaps um deal, deal with inquiries and people that are interested? What's the best way for them to get into contact with you?
Speaker 2:Well, the good news is that I have multiple email addresses and multiple phone numbers. I'm usually a very easy person to get in touch with. For those who don't know me at all, the 42t website has a form you can fill in and that will get to me really, really quickly. That's probably the best way for people who don't know me at all. But of course, marcus, I'm sure you'd be more than delighted to become my PA and start fielding these sorts of things, right.
Speaker 1:No, definitely no, for sure. I mean, we're connectors, so I'm excited by the possibilities of this, and connecting people with each other makes new ideas happen. I think that's what will happen. I imagine you've got this to some point. It will develop partly with new inputs from different people in different markets, and that's how it really accelerates. I'm going to put your details in the show notes anyway, so people can link into that via that. Um, so no problem, thank you. Any sort of final thoughts or or anything you might want to leave people thinking um I.
Speaker 2:I think what I would say is that, if I take a step back and take a helicopter view of things, what I love about this whole RF drying thing is that it's a brilliant case study of how Fortitude T is a technology consultancy work and whilst we've done this for ourselves largely up until now, this is the value we can bring to our clients. We were embedded in an industry. I've been working in this for 20 up until now this is the value we can bring to our clients. So we were embedded in an industry. I've been working in this for 20 odd years now. I could see the trends coming.
Speaker 2:I could see the aqueous printing was coming a reality from lots of different areas. I could see the regulations around um solvent-based things becoming tighter and tighter, and I just knew that there was a problem in the room that people weren't addressing. So that's the consultancy part of it, that's the strategy, that's the insights. And I also knew from other projects we were working on that there was this other technology in another industry that could be adapted to solve an awful lot of the challenges in our industry of printing. And having done that and we then came up with the technology in order to solve that problem. We then went and proved it in our lab. Look, it works. So we were led by the market, we were led by our insights into that market and we then did the technology development on the back of that to show that this can work.
Speaker 2:But we can do that in multiple industries. A lot of the people that, markus, that are part of Futureprint and are part of your organization they don't just work in printing. They, or their customers, work in loads of other industries, and that's the true value about having independent thinkers and really smart people here looking at these things. It's not just the rf. That is a symptom of the, the consulting and the brilliant work and insights that are that we bring fantastic and any final thoughts for people, anything yeah, I don yeah much more to add beyond what Peter's just gone through, to be honest.
Speaker 1:Fair enough. I mean congratulations to you both. It's really exciting Feel the passion and energy and the fact that you've already, you know, gained momentum and great feedback from people in the industry and looking forward personally to see how this develops. So yeah, well done so far and carry on.
Speaker 1:Thank you very much, marcus, and thanks for joining us today, guys, and, as I said, I'll put the links in the show notes and there's an explainer film that we'll put into that and an article as well. So plenty of ways to find out more and get in contact with you both. So, yeah, thanks. That's it for now. So thank you very much.
