Incremental printing of symbolic information – Ink jet – Medium and processing means
Patent
1996-12-03
1998-09-01
Berhane, Adolf
Incremental printing of symbolic information
Ink jet
Medium and processing means
B41J 2155
Patent
active
058017399
DESCRIPTION:
BRIEF SUMMARY
FIELD OF THE INVENTION
The present invention is in the field of computer controlled printing devices. In particular, the field is drop on demand systems for fabric printing.
BACKGROUND OF INVENTION
There is currently no high speed fabric printing system available in which the image to be printed can be directly controlled by a computer system. All current high speed fabric printers require the manufacture of printing plates.
Various digitally controlled printing techniques have been adapted for printing on fabric. For example, ink-jet printers have been used for low-speed fabric printing for some years. Color laser electrophotographic printers have been used for fabric printing via a paper based transfer system.
Direct digital fabric printing has some potential advantages over conventional plate or drum based printers. Amongst these are the following advantages: printed in a single pass
However, current direct digital fabric printers fall far short of the requirements of commercial fabric printing systems.
The principle disadvantage of current systems is printing speed. There is no currently available direct digital fabric printer which can operate at sufficient speed to be commercially viable in any but specialist applications. Commercial fabric printing requires printing speeds of approximately one meter per second, printing on fabric that is two meters wide. Such a system can be constructed using current thermal ink-jet technology; however, many severe technical problems prevent the easy construction of such a system. One of these is power dissipation. Existing thermal ink jet printers consume approximately 20 microJoules of energy for each drop ejected. A four color process printer (cyan, magenta, yellow and black) capable of printing one square meters of fabric per second at 400 dpi using thermal ink jet technology with an energy requirement of 20 microJoules per dot will have a power consumption of 19.8 kW when printing four color black. The dissipation of this amount of power from a small print-head presents significant technical difficulties. Such a system must also be built using a large number of print heads, resulting in high manufacturing costs. Reliability is also low, as existing thermal ink-jet devices are not fault tolerant.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
My concurrently filed applications entitled "Liquid Ink Printing Apparatus and System" and "Coincident Drop-Selection, Drop Separation Printing Method and System" describe systems that afford advantages toward overcoming the above-noted problems. The system produces tiny droplets of liquid ink under the control of digital electronic impulses. Systems can be built which are fast enough for medium volume color fabric printing at high quality. The printing heads of such systems can operate in a self-cooling manner, where all of the energy required to eject a drop can be dissipated in the printed ink drops without raising the temperature of the ink above operating limits. This feature can eliminate the power dissipation problem of thermal ink-jet technology. Print heads with many thousands of nozzles can be made fault-tolerant while simultaneously reducing manufacturing costs. This reduces the production cost and increases the reliability of direct digital fabric printing systems using printing technology. The current invention is a digital color fabric printing system using such printing technology of my above-noted application.
Thus, in one aspect, the present invention constitutes a digital printing system for printing on fabric material, comprising means for moving a fabric wet of uniform width along a transport path from a supply to a take up station, a digital print head assembly located along said transport path and including an integral array of print nozzles extending across the width dimension of the web transport path, ink supply means for providing fabric printing ink to the nozzles of said array, and control means for separating said print head assembly, in timed relation with the movement of said web and under the control of pat
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Berhane Adolf
Eastman Kodak Company
Sales Milton S.
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