What's the Difference Between LED UV Curing and Thermal Curing?

Kevin:

UV LEDs, or UV in general uses typically a reaction that is very quick. It's called free radical reaction, and it's literally faster, a million times faster than the thermal cross leaker reaction, which is simply a condensation reaction. So you use heat to accelerate the condensation reaction. You don't need heat to accelerate the free radical reaction, but you can do more with IR.

Jonathan:

Yeah, so when people say thermal, you said thermal curing. More often than not, when someone's bringing up thermal, it's actually thermal drying. And that's simply using heat to wick away either the water or the solvents that are in a formulation. Typically, that's either done with infrared or in a lot of the printing industry with natural gas fueled dryers, both of which are big energy drain, IR being electrical and obviously gas being gas. And then in addition to that, the solvents being off gassed are VOCs, volatile organic compounds, which are harmful to the air. And so those need to then be incinerated before being released to the atmosphere. The process of drawing them out of the plant also pulls conditioned air out of the plant. So there's a whole host of just environmentally unfriendly slash high energy consumption aspects to thermal drying.