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
#285 - Surface Science for the Digital Age
In this episode of the FuturePrint Podcast, Frazer Chesterman speaks with Peter van Steenacker, Sales Manager at Tigres, one of Europe’s leading providers of atmospheric plasma systems. Known as “Plasma Peter” after 27 years working in surface treatment technology, van Steenacker offers an accessible and insightful look into why plasma pre-treatment has become essential to the growth of industrial digital print.
Peter explains the science behind atmospheric plasma — how it modifies polymer surfaces by increasing wettability and improving adhesion, making it possible to digitally print with high quality on notoriously difficult materials such as polypropylene and polyethylene. He breaks down the two core challenges (low surface energy and crystalline structure) and illustrates how plasma introduces oxygen and heat to transform the printability of plastics.
The conversation also explores real-world applications. Tigres systems are integrated into digital printing machinery used to decorate credit cards, plastic bottles, closures, tubes, cosmetic containers, glass bottles, automotive parts and even aluminium cans coated with polymer. With the rapid expansion of digital print into 3D objects, functional components and consumer packaging, demand for reliable plasma treatment has never been greater.
Peter also discusses Tigres’ precise power-controlled plasma systems, why dose accuracy matters, and how the company works with OEMs and integrators to test materials — especially given the variability and secrecy around polymer formulations.
Looking ahead to FuturePrint Industrial Print Munich, Peter previews his conference session on the fundamentals of plasma for digital print and highlights the 12-nozzle plasma array Tigres will display at the event.
A deep but highly accessible introduction to the enabling technology behind digital print on plastics — essential listening for OEMs, integrators, materials specialists and anyone exploring industrial digital print’s next phase.
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FuturePrint TECH: Industrial Print: 21-22 January '26, Munich, Germany
Hi there and welcome to this week's special Future Print podcast. I have with me someone who I've never done a podcast with before, but has been working with us for a bit of time. It's Peter Van Stiernacker, who is the sales manager of Tigres. Peter, great to see you and good to have a chance to talk to you.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you for introducing me. And uh it's actually really my first time on a podcast. So I'm I'm excited to be here.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, good. And um I think we'll be interested to hear a bit more about Tigres because you know you're in the market and you you do some interesting stuff that people may not know about. Um, so give us firstly a bit about Peter, a bit about you, and then explain a little bit about Tigres.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, okay. My name is Peter van Steener. Uh it's a Dutch name. My father's from the Netherlands. My mother's actually from Denmark, so I speak fluently Danish also. But I was born and raised in Germany, so I speak fluently German also. Um yeah, some people call me Plasma Peter because I've been in the industry for so long. Love it. Yeah, I started in 1998, so for more than 27 years now. Oh wow. Yeah, and I've seen a lot of many things come and go, which is quite interesting over time. And um nowadays, um for for Tigris, actually, what we do is we produce, we develop actually produce and sell plasma systems, mostly atmospheric plasma systems. And when you look at that, when you look at atmospheric plasma systems, what we do is actually mostly again plasma jets, which is a kind of nozzle where we make an electrical discharge inside the nozzle, and we blow out this discharge to say so. Actually, what the discharge does is it produces the plasma and we blow it out with compressed air. So it looks like a little bit like a small flame. And that we use to treat the surface, which is printed on after the treatment.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah. And it's it's quite a crucial piece of technology because I guess it's it works in certain markets where certain applications find it difficult to deposit onto a surface, and this enables you to do that. Is that right? Have I got that right?
SPEAKER_01:Yes, that's correct. Um, what mostly is treated, plasma treated with with our equipment are polymers. And when you look at the group of polymers, and there are a lot of polymers on the market, it's mostly um polyolephins like polyethylene, polypropylene, but also um other materials like polyamide and PVC, uh polycarbonate and so on, but mostly P and PP.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so kind of what we would refer to as plastics mainly, is that right?
SPEAKER_01:Exactly. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, and just so we get an understanding of that. I mean, for us in the future print world and industrial print segment, the plastic market's really interesting and particularly digital on plastic. It offers a great opportunity, doesn't it, in terms of flexibility, in terms of uniqueness, in terms of all sorts of things. So that the way in which your technology combines to help, uh, that's quite crucial. Explain a bit more about that and how it actually what what the kind of method of it is.
SPEAKER_01:Yes. Um, a lot of customers come to us and ask for help when they want to print on polymers, plastics, parts of plastic. And actually, what they mostly want us to treat, or want our machines to treat or systems to treat, are the objects itself. Um, so not we don't treat a film usually with our systems, but we treat the parts, for example, a container, a glass bottle, a plastic bottle, a part, where then afterwards, after the treatment, you use a digital printing device to print on um nice pictures, texts, whatever. Yeah, and we do it mostly directly in the production line, directly before the printing.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that makes sense. That makes a lot of sense. And I guess what it does is it enables you to well explain why it is difficult to print onto a plastic. Why would that be difficult, Peter?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, especially those polyolephins, they are crystalline or partly crystalline polymers, like polyethylene, polypropylene are typical in that regard. And what the problem is, you have actually two different problems, sometimes three problems. The first problem is that they have a very low surface energy. And that means that when you print on them, the small droplets from the ink head, um they they retract when they pr when they hit the surface. So they squash out, but they retract immediately. That's called de-wetting.
SPEAKER_00:Yep.
SPEAKER_01:And so the print doesn't look very nice actually. So grayish and not very sharp. And the plasma treatment, one of the effects is that it brings oxygen in the surface. Yep. And the oxygen increases the wettability.
SPEAKER_00:Ah, interesting.
SPEAKER_01:So the droplets get bigger on the surface, the same size of droplet appears larger.
SPEAKER_00:Yep.
SPEAKER_01:And then they easily can overlap, for example, and then you get a very brilliant, a very good looking, very sharp-edged print. That's one effect. The increase of wettability. The second one is uh at least as important as the first one, which is the improvement of adhesion. It's not the same than wettability. Very important to distinguish it. Um the adhesion is mostly improved, not through the increase of wettability, which is done mostly by the oxygen, as we just learned, but by the change of the phase of the polymer, which mostly is crystalline in those parts. And the plasma changes this phase from crystalline to amorphous by mostly the heat actually of the plasma. So you could uh imagine a picture like you have a brick wall when it's crystalline, and the plasma then um puts heat into this crystal structure, so the bricks, and the heat actually transforms it to a plate of spaghetti. So you have a very open structure then in the polymer, and there the ink, very put very simply, can very easily penetrate into the spaghetti structure and then harden, and then you get a very good adhesion.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah. So it's it creates a sort of bind, something to bind with, doesn't it?
SPEAKER_01:Yes. So you get this open kind of structure, and the ink is able to penetrate into that.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, no, it makes a makes a lot of sense. Um I I guess from the point of view of understanding um your key selling points. Uh, you talked to me earlier before we started about the control system.
SPEAKER_01:Yes. So you can um make an electrical discharge, that is what we do in our nozzles, and the discharge actually produces the plasma. So a plasma is an ionized gas. It's also called the fourth state of matter. So you have um um concrete or solid, you have liquid, then you have gas. So that's the three states of matter. And if you put more energy in the into the gas, it excites to an ionized state, and this is called plasma. So we just take usual ordinary air, we make a discharge, we create the plasma of the air. And if you don't control the power of your discharge, you don't actually know how much power you have in your process. And the power directly affects how good you treat the surface. So really important, if you really want to be precise in the plasma dose, as we call it, you have to have a control systems if you want to have the same quality of treatment, and that means the same quality of adhesion and wettability of your print. And that's why this control the controller is so important.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, got it. So so thinking a little bit about I guess the applications here. Um tell me a bit more about where you might use this.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. Um many of our customers in the printing industry um are actually printing machine manufacturers. Yeah, so they buy our plasma systems to integrate it into the printing machine. And what they, for example, print on are uh credit cards, customer cards, ID cards, all sorts of containers, be it tubes or or boxes, or also glass containers, um, for example, for very expensive cologne or perfume. Got it and um cans. Actually, when you have a can of aluminum, what we treat at is not the aluminum, because those cans are actually painted when we treat them. So we treat the paint. So we treat actually a polymer. Got it, got it, and that's only a small fraction of the parts. Um and the printing machine manufacturer, they actually talk with us about the applications they have, and we then have a look at it and look at which plasma tool, so the different types of plasma nozzles, is the best for this specific application. Um, many times uh some testing is done because in many cases nobody exactly knows how the polymer will behave because there's a lot of um uh stuff inside which nobody is talking about. That's why testing has to be made in most cases. And most of our customers do it themselves. We we we uh support them doing the testing if needed.
SPEAKER_00:And uh in terms of your relationship with your customers, so explain a bit more about them. Are they are they targeting tier two customers? Are they are they just general printers? What what's the what are they, you know, how you how you working with them? And um what kind of companies are they targeting? Is it sort of automotive? Is it white good? Is it medical tech? What what are you sensing?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, all of it actually. Oh right. Um yeah, some of them, for example, sell the parts they print on to the automotive industry, for example. Yeah, that's one example. Others, for example, um print on uh caps, which then is um or the caps are produced by a second company, big one, and they then sell it to the companies that make um the beverages, for example.
SPEAKER_00:Uh yeah.
SPEAKER_01:So so the small companies like don't know, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, whatever.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:All those things.
SPEAKER_00:So you're supplying to them, but so what you're you're actually targeting the company that prints the uh prints and produces the lids, the the tops.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, actually we we um sell our systems to the printer manufacturer, for example. They then sell the printers for to to the manufacturers of of the closures, and they sell the closures then to the big companies.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah. So it's a kind of supply chain, isn't it?
SPEAKER_01:Exactly. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, interesting. So just out of curiosity, um, I'm interested because obviously you're quite in terms of what you're doing and what you're selling, it's it's clearly in a space that is uh either growing, developing, dying, you know. What do you what do you sense in terms of the trends? Because you're you're in a good place because you're kind of you're supplying to certain segments, and you must be able to see certain trends at the moment, so that you'd say to me, Yeah, actually, packaging market's quite interesting, automotive market. Well, then maybe that's not so good, but maybe uh just tell me what you're seeing of your your products.
SPEAKER_01:What we are seeing, especially in the last, I would say, five to ten years, and increasingly so, is the the increase in the share of digital printing when it comes to printing in general. Yeah, because printing has been known for many years, and I've seen it for many years from temporal printing, sales green printing, and so on. But since digital printing has been now very well established, I would call it, also technically, people have learned a lot about how to use it. The printheads have a specific width now, and people now know how to use it, on which materials, how they have to build the machines, all those small details that you don't do overnight. This has the knowledge has increased, and now we see almost exponentially the increase of companies selling machines with that kind of technology. And so also increases the demand for pre-treatment when it comes to printing on polymers mostly for us.
SPEAKER_00:Interesting.
SPEAKER_01:And it's quite interesting because 20 years ago um it was more or less um tempo print and silk screen printing. And that's it. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and and you know, we know, don't we, that 2003, four, five, six, yeah, digital print went into markets like the wide format market, and then and then gradually started to move into other segments, as you said yourself, into packaging. Into um, yeah, printing on plastic, printing on metal, on on on all sorts of different things. So, yeah, you're you're right in what you're saying. It's quite interesting hearing. And actually, Peter, hearing you talk about uh, you know, when you started in the industry, which is quite a long time ago, as you said yourself, um, that gives us a bit of a flavor of how how the market has evolved.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah. Just to give you an idea, I I visited Gorenje in Slovenia, I think in 2000 and oh what when was it? Before the year 2000, I I can't really remember. It was a long time ago. And there were over 3,000 people, and they did the screen printing by hand at that time.
SPEAKER_00:Oh wow, yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Just to give you an idea what what I looked at at that time. And uh now slowly still the I don't know about Gorenia, but but still screen printing is used a lot, especially in that industry. But slowly it's it's uh moving towards the digital printing.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah. I mean, similarly, I remember when I was working at FESPA and we ran an event in India the first time we ran it in 2005. So this is actually a similar sort of timing to what you were talking about. And me going to see factories where everything was, you know, there was uh they were printing on plastic buckets basically, and it was all hand done, so little screen and then just a little or tampon, you know, kind of so everything was done like that now, and and obviously things changed, don't they? So exactly as you said, it's it's very different now. Um kind of just uh wanting to get a bit of an idea. You're obviously speaking at our event at Motorworld in Munich. Um give us a bit of a flavor of what you'll be talking about and what you will be presenting on your stand. What are you what are you thinking you'll be showing there and what is it that you'll be talking about in the conference?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. In the conference, um, I will make for my how would you put this? Um I will talk about the the basics of treatment when it comes to digital printing, obviously, for for this this um purpose. And uh we don't have so much time, so I will make it very condensed, I would call it, to show the principles because it's still very, very little known. And there's a lot of um confusion, especially when it comes to wettability and adhesion. Most conflate that. So that's for me, I think it's very important that people know what to look for when making the testing. So I want to give them the knowledge to know what they're doing, actually. And um we will show a system which um we will put on our booth, which is quite small actually, um, which is um consistent of 12 plasma nozzles. So we show in principle that we also can treat quite wide with the systems, but at the same time with a very controlled type of array of nozzles. It won't be operational in that term that there will come plasma out of the nozzles, but you will be able to see it.
SPEAKER_00:You'll be able to see it. You will see it, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:You can touch it, you can can get an idea about it.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that's really good. That's a really good innovation. Listen, Peter, it's been interesting talking to you. Um, I just wonder if there's anything you would say to us if you know, if as we come to the end of the podcast, in terms of Tigres and what you do, in terms of kind of you know, a kind of strong final word that you'd say about the business.
SPEAKER_01:Um a strong word about the business. Well, I think at the moment it's going in the right direction. So I'm I'm very pleased actually to be um on the future print, to be in the circle of people in the industry. I've been now around for three years, and it's it's very very good actually to see how how relationships form. And I think maybe that's a good endpoint that the relationship between the people that are with different companies in the field is very, very important. So we learn from each other how to get the best solutions into the market.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I think you're right. It's a one thing I would note about our the industry that we're in, and particularly that you're in, is the collaboration, isn't it? The sense in which there's we're not all competing directly with each other, although we are competing, people are competing, but there's an awful lot of projects that will involve a conversation between two or three different parties to deliver a solution. And you know, plasma treatment is one of those parts, isn't it? Particularly if you're dealing with industrial printing digitally onto plastic. So um I think I think that kind of sums it up, really, Peter. Peter, thank you very much for giving us your time. Really appreciate it. Looking forward to seeing you in Munich on January 21st and 22nd. Thank you very much.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you very much. I'm also looking forward to being Munich. See you soon.
