Ink-particle simulation for continuous Inkjet type printer

Abstract

Industrial continuous Inkjet printers are typically used for printing directly onto various types of products such as cans, bottles, and food packaging in production lines. To enable their application to higher speed production lines, their print quality needs to be improved. This means that ink-particle simulation technology is needed to clarify the factors that affect print quality. Print distortion is caused by certain droplet shapes in Inkjet breakup and aerodynamic and electric interference among the ink particles flying from the nozzle to the print target. A simulation technique has been developed that enables the breakup into droplets and the trajectories of the ink particles flying from the nozzle to the print target to be calculated with initial data obtained by breakup simulation. Printing of a line of seven dots was simulated well with this simulation code without initial particle input data. Also print distortion was prevented by inserting dummy particles between charged ones in the simulation.