Ink jet printers generally have a ‘jet stack,’ a stack of brazed steel plates that have manifolds to route the ink from ink reservoirs to an array of jets from which ink is dispensed. The jet stack may consist of several plates and the plates need to align correctly for proper functioning of the ink jet printer.
Current implementations of jet stack plates use a single hole on each plate, with each successive plate from an aperture plate to the diaphragm plate having a hole of a larger diameter. The diaphragm plate resides the closest to the jet, generally a transducer receives a signal to activate, as it activates it depresses the diaphragm and pushes a droplet of ink through a jet. Ideally, as the plates are stacked together, the holes would be perfectly concentric, but variation almost always occurs.
The variation is measured with an automated video system. Poor contrast between the hole edge and the plate to which the current plate is bonded from below results in erroneous measurements. The plates are shiny, stainless steel and the hole and surface quality vary. The automated video system uses top lighting and it becomes difficult for the system to sort out reflections and locate the hole edges to determine if the holes align correctly. Erroneous measurements then occur.
If caught, the erroneous measurements require re-measuring manually, which consumes time and resources. If they erroneous measurements are not caught, the jet stack plates do not align correctly. The jet stack will still operate but at a lower efficiency. Further, the management of the process flow is affected, because the error in the process is not corrected. In some instances, the re-measuring and manual alignment process is skipped entirely, being deemed as too high a cost for the results.
Embodiments of the invention may be best understood by reading the disclosure with reference to the drawings, wherein:
The top plate in the stack 10 has an alignment hole 28 in the alignment region 12 that has the largest diameter of the alignment holes. Alignment hole 26 resides on the previous plate in the stack, viewing this stack as the top plate being the last plate placed in the stack with the previous plates being placed prior. Holes 24, 22, 20, 28, 16 and 14 all belong to previous plates in the stack. Each subsequent plate in the stack has a larger diameter, allowing the edges of the holes from the previous plates to be seen from the top. The series of holes form a ‘cone’ type structure and may be referred to here as cone alignment.
During the stacking and alignment process, a vision system, not shown, analyzes arcs from around the edges of the holes to determine if the holes are aligned. The vision system views the plates from a perspective at the ‘top’ of the stack and uses a top light for illumination. The generally stainless steel plates reflect the light up into the vision system, making analysis of the edges of the holes and their positions difficult and inaccurate. As a result, operators must manually align and check the plates. This process takes a long time and the manufacturing process usually just skips the alignment process due to the inefficiency.
The profile image presented in
In addition, the positions of the smaller holes from plate to plate may not be sequentially located as is shown in
In this manner, the vision system can locate the edges of the spot of interest and measure the distance of that spot from the other spots to determine if the plates align correctly. The bottom lighting allows higher contrast at the edge of the holes. This in turn allows the vision system to have more easily located edges to analyze to determine the position of the holes relative to other holes.
The arrays of holes may reside at one end of the jet stack plates, such as the left end. For higher precision, a second array of holes may reside on each plate at the end opposite the first end, such as the right end. This ensures a higher precision in placing the plates into alignment.
An experiment used a set of chemically-etched test plates to demonstrate the new methodology. An automated coordinate measuring machine (CMM) system used a newly created program to measure locations of the individual small diameter holes within the arrays at both ends of a printer jet stack. As mentioned earlier, a printer jet stack is a set of plates having various features for managing ink flow from a reservoir to an outlet jet that deposits drops of ink on a print substrate such as paper. The experiment used the same low-level bottom lighting setting for every hole measurement.
Excluding set up, the start to finish run time for the procedure to align the plates was 1 minute and 45 seconds. This time includes measuring a left and right array at the ends of the jet stack. The experiment included a focus step for every feature, which may be optional. The experiment did not do a full jet stack alignment, but estimates including the extra plate-plate alignments for a full jet stack project a full alignment process to take approximately 2 minutes. This uses less than half the time than previous methods and no re-measurements will be required.
A side view of a stack of aligned plates is shown in
In this manner, alignment of the plates of the jet stack occurs with more precision and less time than other processes. While the discussion here focused on the alignment of plates for a print head jet stack, the alignment process may apply to any type of alignment needed for stacks of plates.
It will be appreciated that several of the above-disclosed and other features and functions, or alternatives thereof, may be desirably combined into many other different systems or applications. Also that various presently unforeseen or unanticipated alternatives, modifications, variations, or improvements therein may be subsequently made by those skilled in the art which are also intended to be encompassed by the following claims.
This application is a divisional of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/738,581, filed Apr. 23, 2007, which is hereby incorporated by reference herein in its entirety.
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Number | Date | Country | |
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20100118296 A1 | May 2010 | US |
Number | Date | Country | |
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Parent | 11738581 | Apr 2007 | US |
Child | 12689215 | US |