Piezo printhead control : jetting any drop at any time

Full flexible use of inkjet printhead units in printing systems requires consistent generation of drops with any given volume and velocity at any moment and place desired. True drop-on-demand is currently hampered by physical phenomena in the printhead. These are residual vibrations and crosstalk resulting from conventional jets. This chapter presents control strategies to overcome these problems. First, with experiment-based control the drop characteristics are measured and the jet pulse that activates the jetting of a drop is optimised. Choosing a proper jet pulse structure, one can deal with single-channel residual vibration, multi-channel crosstalk, and even generalise optimisation over each bitmap to be printed. Secondly, with a model-based control approach, optimised jet pulses can be derived without additional measurement equipment. Considering the inkjet mechanism as an uncertain system and designing a robust pulse allows to deal with differences between model and real system. Both the experiment- and model-based method result in strongly improved drop characteristics, which is experimentally verified and thereby provide very valuable steps towards adaptive printing systems.

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