UV curing

[5] It is used in flexographic, offset, pad, and screen printing processes; where UV curing systems are used to polymerize images on screen-printed products, ranging from T-shirts to 3D and cylindrical parts.

[8] Industries that use UV curing include medicine, automobiles, cosmetics (for example artificial fingernails and gel nail polish), food, science, education, and art.

Speeding up the curing, or drying step,[11] in a process can reduce flaws and errors by decreasing time that an ink or coating spends as wet.

This has led to UV curing becoming fundamental in many fields of manufacturing and technology, where changes in strength, hardness, durability, chemical resistance, and many other properties are required.

[13] The bulbs work by sending an electric discharge to excite a mixture of mercury and noble gases, generating a plasma.

Once the mercury reaches a plasma state, it irradiates a high spectral output in the UV region of the electromagnetic spectrum.

By modifying the bulb mixture with different gases and metal halides, the distribution of wavelength peaks can be altered, and material interactions are changed.

Benefiting from lower-temperature operation and the lack of hazardous mercury,[15] UV LEDs have replaced medium-pressure lamps in many applications.

Major limitations include difficulties in designing optics for curing on complex three-dimensional objects, and poor efficiency at generating lower-wavelength energy, though development work continues.