Minimization of cross-talk in a piezo inkjet printhead based on system identification and feedforward control

Abstract

The printing quality delivered by a Drop-on-Demand (DoD) inkjet printhead is severely affected by the residual oscillations in an ink channel and the cross-talk between neighboring ink channels. For a single ink channel, our earlier contribution shows that the actuation pulse can be designed, using a physical model, to effectively damp the residual oscillations. It is not always possible to obtain a good physical model for a single ink channel. A physical model for a multi-input multioutput (MIMO) inkjet printhead is made even more sophisticated by the presence of the cross-talk effect. This paper proposes a system identification-based approach to build a MIMO model for an inkjet printhead. Additionally, the identified MIMO model is used to design new actuation pulses to effectively minimize the residual oscillations and the cross-talk. Using simulation and experimental results, we demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method. ‡ This research has been carried out as part of the Octopus project with Océ Technologies B.V. under the responsibility of the Embedded Systems Institute. This project is partially supported by the Netherlands Ministry of Economic Affairs under the Bsik program P90600.

Soft Sensing-Based In Situ Control of Thermofluidic Processes in DoD Inkjet Printing

“…Two factors play crucial roles behind the deterioration of the droplet properties: 1) nozzles acoustics and 2) the temperature of liquid droplets. In [7], the problems related to nozzle acoustics are addressed using a feedforward controller. The current article considers that adequate measures are already incorporated to consider the problems related to nozzle acoustics and, hence, will not be discussed.…”

“…The applications of control techniques are largely restricted to designing the DoD voltage pulses for generating droplets and compensating problems related to nozzle acoustics (cf. [5], [7], [11]). Apart from these works, there are only a few openly accessible patents that focus on thermofluidic processes, although they regard thermal inkjet printers and not piezoelectric ones.…”

“…Among them, the behavior of the graph theoretic model ( 1)-( 3) is equivalently described by PI in (7). The equivalence holds as ( 7) is a result of signal rearrangement in (1)-(3).…”

Soft Sensing Based In Situ Control of Thermo-Fluidic Processes in DoD Inkjet Printing

“…Two factors play crucial roles behind the deterioration of the droplet properties: a) nozzles acoustics, and b) the temperature of liquid droplets. In [6], the problems related to nozzle acoustics are solved using a feedforward controller. The current paper considers that adequate measures are already incorporated to take into account the problems related to nozzle acoustics and, hence, will not be discussed.…”

“…The applications of control techniques are largely restricted to designing the DoD voltage pulses for generating droplets and compensating problems related to nozzle acoustics (c.f. [4], [6], [10]). In general, a systemtheoretic outlook to model and control thermo-fluidic aspects in DoD inkjet printing is still mostly missing.…”