Actuating Voltage Waveform Optimization of Piezoelectric Inkjet Printhead for Suppression of Residual Vibrations.

Muhammad Ali Shah,Shin Hur,Bo Yeon Lee,Duck-Gyu Lee,Hyojin An,Nam Woon Kim

doi:10.3390/mi11100900

Abstract

After a piezoelectric inkjet printhead jets the first droplet, the actuating membrane still vibrates, creating residual vibrations in the ink channel, which can degrade the inkjet printhead performance. For suppressing these vibrations, an optimized actuating voltage waveform with two pulses must be obtained, of which the first pulse is used for jetting and the second pulse is used to suppress the residual vibrations. In this study, the pressure history within the ink channel of a recirculating piezoelectric inkjet printhead was first acquired using lumped element modeling. Then, for suppressing residual vibrations, a bipolar voltage waveform was optimized via analysis of the tuning time ( ), dwell time (), rising time (), falling time (), and voltage amplitude of the second pulse. Two voltage waveforms, Waveform 01 and Waveform 02, were optimized thereafter. In Waveform 01, , and and were finalized as the optimal parameters; in the case of another waveform, the optimal parameters of , , and were found to be , , and , respectively. The optimal voltage amplitude of the second pulse was found to be 1/3 the amplitude of the first pulse. On the basis of our analysis, the tuning time in Waveform 01 is the most sensitive parameter, and the performance yielded is even poorer than that yielded by standard waveform, if not optimized. Therefore, the other waveform is recommended for the suppression of residual vibrations.

Highlights

Continuous streams of developments in the field of printing technology were performed by the researchers over the past few decades
Some designs with ink recirculation have been reported in the literature to prevent these problems [25,26]; for a recirculating piezoelectric inkjet printhead, articles containing the optimization of voltage waveforms for the suppression of residual vibrations are missing in the literature to the best of the authors’ knowledge
The pressure profile acquired by the standard waveform has residual vibrations

Summary

Introduction

Continuous streams of developments in the field of printing technology were performed by the researchers over the past few decades. Some designs with ink recirculation have been reported in the literature to prevent these problems [25,26]; for a recirculating piezoelectric inkjet printhead, articles containing the optimization of voltage waveforms for the suppression of residual vibrations are missing in the literature to the best of the authors’ knowledge. We used a lumped element model (LEM) to optimize the voltage waveform of a recirculating piezoelectric inkjet printhead for the suppression of residual vibrations

Equivalent Circuit Model

Results and Discussion

Conclusions and Remarks