Case Study: The N2 Company

The N2 Company prints 800 hyperlocal monthly magazines across four national brands. The company’s state-of-the art facility in Irving, TX, runs at a lively pace to print 20 million pages per month of two-sided, tabloid-sized color. Yet, three-day weekends are routine for the small crew who run print production at The N2 Company. First shift works Tuesday through Friday, and second shift works Monday through Thursday. This clockwork-like efficiency at a large scale is driven by the speed and precision of the operation.

Plant layout supports publishing speed and scale
The 30,000-square-foot publishing plant is laid out like a city. Each press is a district, with spacious streets for
forklift traffic forming city blocks. In the body pages neighborhood, the human eye sees 400-foot-per minute streaks of color on white roll paper exiting the print heads of two HP PageWide A2200 Inkjet web presses. By the time the paper slows enough to be recognized as magazine pages, it has been printed on both sides, cut, collated and loaded onto a pallet strategically placed along a forklift route.

Next block over is the cover pages neighborhood, where archive-quality covers are rendered on HP’s gold standard in digital press technology—an Indigo 7K press. Covers are printed on pre-cut 12 x 18 cover stock in a process that employs electrically charged plates and liquid ElectroInk to produce stunning clarity and color depth.

Relative humidity is critical to the paper path
Facility Engineer Daniel Jaime is responsible for the flow of print production. Hidden among his visible responsibilities like presses and lighting, Daniel is constantly aware of the relative humidity (RH) in the air. If RH in the plant drops below 49 percent, cut pages curl up from the stack, which jams the paper path. If the paper stops, the press shuts down. “Stopping and restarting a press can take over an hour,” explains Daniel, “so I schedule maintenance intervals to keep the water treatment and HPA systems running smoothly.”

When to choose an Adiatec high-pressure atomizing system

Engineers who specify DriSteem’s Adiatec high-pressure system typically do so for applications requiring at least two of the following:
1. Large humidification load
2. Simultaneous humidification and cooling
3. Multiple zones

For The N2 Company, it was items 1 and 2. In fact, cooling while humidifying is often a seasonal—and even year-round—need in parallels outside of the tropics. This is significant in terms of energy savings because every 12 pounds of water evaporated into the air provides about a ton of cooling. Maximum humidification load at The N2 Company is almost 500 pounds per hour, which means more than 40 tons of free cooling per hour.