New Developments of Shear-Mode Piezo Inkjet Heads for Industrial Printing Applications

Piezoelectric inkjet printheads have many advantages such as a wide range of ink compatibility, flexibility in drop control, and high durability, and are widely used for industrial printing applications. Among piezoelectric heads, shear mode printheads are low power consumption and easy to manufacture wide print width heads. We have developed a new type of shear mode head, in which electric capacitance of actuator is minimized and ink flow paths and electrode connections are significantly simplified, by the use of new, high efficiency actuator design. Two types of 1024 nozzles heads with nozzle density of 360 npi and wide print width of 72mm have developed. (1) KM1024 is the 3 cycle operation type and power consumption per nozzle is reduced by 50% compared to conventional KM512 printhead. (2) KM1024i is the independent operation type with four rows of 256 nozzles and has achieved firing frequency of 35kHz at a drop volume of 14pl.