Fluid drop ejector

Details Fluid drop ejector Fluid drop ejector

1999-10-14

2001-11-20

Nguyen, Thinh (Department: 2861)

Incremental printing of symbolic information

Ink jet

Ejector mechanism

C347S020000

Reexamination Certificate

active

06318841

ABSTRACT:

FIELD OF THE INVENTION
The present invention is drawn to a silicon based fluid ejector mechanism which operates on the principle of electrostatic attraction.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
Most common ink jet drop ejectors are thermal or acoustic. Thermal ink jet (TIJ) technologies are based upon rapid nucleation which takes place within a channel containing a water based ink. Such a technology is very limited in its ability for “on demand” drop size modulation due to adding complexity and cost through the addition of multiple channel heaters of various sizes. The thermal ink jet technology is also limited in life characteristics due primarily to the intense heat that is generated and the subsequent thermal stressing and adverse reaction with inks. Additionally, thermal ejectors can be fairly inefficient and, as stated previously, can also generate a lot of heat.
Acoustic ejectors either displace a volume or propagate an acoustic pressure to generate a fluid drop. One of the most common of this type of technology is piezo based. Piezo technologies are theoretically capable of “on demand” drop size modulation and, because of the piezoelectric nature of their actuation, well designed applications have very long life characteristics. However, piezo based technologies are disadvantaged due to the high cost of processing piezo materials and the resulting size of an ink jet array (number of nozzles). Another type of acoustic ejector is Acoustic Ink Jet (AIP). Again, AIP suffers from the difficulty of making small structures such as 600 DPI, and also is fairly inefficient and costly.
Some electrostatically actuated ink jet technologies are based upon deformation of a membrane in a totally enclosed structure via electrostatic forces. Because of the totally enclosed, hence highly constrained structure, very large ejection mechanisms must be considered to compensate for the very small deformation of the membrane. This leads to very small drop sizes, very large ejection mechanisms, very large applied voltages and/or very high costs.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
This invention is a fluid ejector that is low cost, uses standard silicon batch fabrication techniques, is useable with a wide variety of ink designs, reliable and ejects very small drops for gray scale printing. Some of the advantages of such a device over current types of ink jet ejectors (thermal, acoustic) are: drop size modulation can be achieved through controlling the amount of piston motion and the velocity of the piston (through the applied voltage/field); ink latitude (composition, type—i.e., water based, oil based) can be relatively large; various configurations (top shooter, side shooter, etc.) are possible consistent with the capabilities of production techniques, production costs will be low due to the use of common electronics industry surface micromachining technologies; and integrated electronic controls are achievable due to the nature of the silicon based production techniques used.


REFERENCES:
patent: 6027205 (2000-02-01), Herbert
patent: 6239821 (2001-05-01), Silverbrook

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