Abstract
The new HP Inkjet Page Wide Array technology delivers breakthrough speed via an array of inkjet nozzles covering the entire paper width. Printing is done in a single pass, which makes nozzle health critical to meet product image quality and reliability requirements. A nozzle or groups of nozzles failing to eject drops create visible straight white lines on the printouts. The nozzle array contains a total of more than 200,000 nozzles. There is a challenge compared to current large format inkjet printing systems. First, single pass is much more sensitive to failing nozzles than multi-pass. Secondly, the number of nozzles and the productivity requirements are an order of magnitude higher. Existing solutions for nozzle health measure and compensation are no longer valid. The paper describes a new solution (hardware and algorithms) developed to measure and compensate for those nozzles that may temporarily or permanently fail to eject drops. The solution developed highly reduces time to measure, it allows checking 200K nozzles in 90 sec. It is easily scalable to different types of print heads and array sizes, it can even also work in scanning systems. Nozzles are analyzed regularly and printer classifies them based on historic measures. Compensation algorithms include nozzle substitution using adjacent nozzles or nozzles of a different color that are in line in paper axis direction. Specific cleaning routines can be self-triggered to guarantee proper printout quality. Customer is informed about the status of the quality of print heads.
Published Version
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