Abstract
One of the important issues regarding inkjet printers is that misfiring should not occur during intermittent printing over the long run. But such misfiring was observed for some consumer printers which were used for only a short term, less than the printer's life span. So it was a major problem in view of the long-term reliability of the products. We performed detailed studies about the problem and found the cause of the misfiring. It was known that small bubbles stayed in the ink flow channels of the printer head, grew into the big bubbles, and ink quantity decreased because of narrowing ink flow paths, we then thought it was related to the phenomenon that fine ink drops could not fly out from the nozzle holes and it would perform poorly. To solve the problems, we developed a new plastic material and a new flow channel structure. The material has high-level barrier characteristics against gases such as oxygen and water vapor. And the flow channel structure had several ditches that serve as bypasses and some ribs which lead bubbles with only small growth to the center of the flow channel. In this solution, we found that the ink quantity would not decrease in the long term and it suppressed the bubble growth rate. We believe that the misfiring occurrence would decrease with these measures.
