Influence of the Rotation of Inkjet Printing Heads on the Print Quality

In this study, we focus on the design specifications of industrial inkjet printers. In these systems, the printing heads are mounted individually on a carriage. The in-plane print head rotation has been identified as one of the reasons for the ink dots misplacement. This study aims to work out the influence of the angles of CMYK printing heads on the print quality. Ultimately, some mechanical tolerances are given to achieve different levels of print quality.A two-step approach is used: one colour, then the four CMYK colours are considered. In the first step, a layout of the nozzles plate is used in a computer simulation. In parallel, a prototype has been built to validate the simulations. In the second step, a CMYK virtual printer is introduced in place of a four colours experimental system. A criterion on dots superposition is introduced to asses the influence of the heads rotation on the colour reproduction.The nozzle plate layout has been added to a CMYK virtual printer to characterise the printing heads rotation. The model has been tested with XAAR 760 GS8 print head. Experiments are in a fair agreement with simulations for the one-colour approach. A cone angle for one and four colours has been derived.