A Comparative Study of Optimal Design for an Inkjet Printer Tube With and Without Performance Variations

Abstract

As a new generation of printing technology, thermal inkjet (TIJ) has been widely adopted to meet the increasing demand for high printing quality and efficiency at an affordable price. High air barrier tubes play an important role in the reliable operation of the printhead in a commercial thermal inkjet printer. Desired tube qualities include low stiffness and low pressure drop, along with others. Tube stiffness and pressure drop can be lowered through the selection of proper tube layer configuration, geometry and material properties. However, the existing tube design practice is highly heuristic and design results are not optimal. Furthermore, there is no robust design consideration in the current design, and it is hard to trace and compare the tube quality from different groups of designers. In this work, a comparative study using industrial examples is conducted to search for a reusable robust design methodology for TIJ tube design. Two cases using different optimization strategies are investigated. In case A, a performance based optimization strategy is used, and the design objectives are the target performances without variation consideration. In Case B, a robust design based optimization strategy is used, and the variations of the target performances are incorporated in the design objectives. A comparison of their results with the current practice shows that the optimization strategies can greatly improve the efficiency of the current tube design process. More important, the optimization strategy with variation consideration yields robust results and provides much richer design knowledge to support designers with various experiences to make better decisions.