Design to Achieve Accuracy in Ink-Jet Cylindrical Printing Machines

Machines for direct digital inkjet printing on cylindrical containers are a new technology out on the market. The commercialization in the industrial sector has been affected by their high precision. This led to the use of mechanisms with narrow manufacturing tolerances and to the searches for topologies that have the least accumulated error without affecting quality. Machines with topologies that work on flat substrates have printing and productivity problems working on cylindrical substrates. This research paper presents the qualitative design of direct digital inkjet printers working over cylindrical substrates comparing five mechanical topologies; three topologies with radial distribution and two topologies with parallel distribution. The aim of these topologies is to find the precision, quality and efficiency of the printer taking into account the restrictions present in its construction. Each topology has separate constitutive mechanisms, the tolerance ranges between the movements of the print head and the substrate in order to determine precision are analyzed. Out of the five topologies described and analyzed in the phase diagram in section 3, three of them meet the requirements. One of the three topologies that meet the requirements is not being developed due to current technological limitations