品質工学による紙カール安定化

抄録

Curling of paper in a copy machine is detrimental to copy quality, and a large curl inflicts loss on the user by causing the copy to jam in the transport path downstream of the fuser. A study was made to evaluate the proportionality of a dynamic characteristic with the degree of curl of the paper entering the fuser as the input and the degree of curl correction as the paper passed through the fuser as the output. Environmental factors and other noise factors such as the type of paper were selected and combined according to the direction of curl to obtain an optimal set of conditions. A confirmation experiment using the optimal conditions showed good reproducibility of the gain of the S/N ratio. Product development was performed with design parameters based on the optimal conditions. The resulting improvement in the field, in comparison with a copy machine with the same configuration to which quality engineering had not been applied, nearly matched the confirmed improvement in the gain of the S/N ratio.