The Doctor Blade Assembly as a Gravure Press Subsystem

Doctor Blade Function

The function of the doctor blade is to remove unwanted ink, adhesive, or coating materials from the face of the rotating gravure cylinder, leaving ink or coating materials that can be transferred to a substrate only in the recessed cell of the image area. The widths of even wide (compressed) shadow cells (maybe 200 microns) are of the same order of magnitude as the width of the contact zone of the blade with the cylinder (maybe 105 microns for a stepped blade with .003-inch tip thickness). It is, therefore, not plausible that the blade will ever bend such as to “wipe into the cell,” regardless of the angle at which the blade is applied.