Paper cockling happens when too much water is absorbed in the paper. The water causes the paper to form wrinkles, waves or row(s) of hump back bridges. If extensive enough, it can cause the print head to touch it or even rip it apart. Paper cockling is one of the highest reported causes of waste and lost revenue in dye sublimation transfer printing today!

Below some thoughts on how this might be happening.

  • When a dyesub paper is printed small droplets of ink hit the paper
  • The coating on the paper is absorbing a big part of the watery fluid phase of the ink
  • The absorbed fluid is passed on to the fibres in the paper supporting the coating
  • Laying too much ink down will cause the fibres of the paper supporting the coating to become saturated. This will cause the paper to cockle under the heavy moisture load.

Here are things you can do to prevent or resolve this issue:

  1. Apply as little ink as possible onto the paper. This also makes sense looking at costs, so creating a suitable profile will be profitable in more ways than one
  2. Make the paper as dry as possible before printing, not only on the printed side, but also (maybe even more important) the non printed side. Use the installed drying capacity
  3. If no drying capacity is available leaving the printed roll for a longer time on the shelf might help
  4. In extreme cases (transferring onto substrates that are nearly non-porous), customers place a printed roll in a box and blew air through the box, actually drying the rolls for 4 – 24 hours
  5. It might be an idea to dry the printed paper on the transfer calendar, feeding it at a high speed and a lower temperature than transfer conditions.
  6. You might need to change to a heavier dye sublimation transfer paper.