Application of Mahalanobis Taguchi System to Thermal Ink Jet Imaging Quality Inspection
2000 Volume 8 Issue 3 Pages 77-85
Details
2000 Volume 8 Issue 3 Pages 77-85
Color thermal ink jet printing is an important part of the industry's arsenal of printing technologies for the coming years. Efficient conversion of electrical and thermal energy into robust ink drop generation,(and subsequent delivery) to a wide variety of substrates is required. Quite complex manufacturing processes are used to create devices which can deliver ink drops with required target directionality, drop velocity, drop volume, image darkness, etc. over a wide range of signal and noise space. Inspection of image quality is used during online production operation to cost-effectively reduce outgoing variation among units. 100% inspection is justified based on loss function estimates considering inspection cost, defective loss, and quality loss after shipment. Classificaton of print cartridges as either acceptable or not acceptable is required, based on a multitude of inspection characteristics. The Taguchi/Mahalanobis system was applied to final inspection of image quality characteristics for a number of reasons :
1) To summarize multivariate results with a continuous number expressing distance from centroid of "good" ones.
2) To reduce measurement costs through identification and removal of measurements with low discrimination power
3) Balance misclassification cost for both type Ⅰ and Ⅱ error.
4) Develop case study from which practitioners and Subject Matter Experts in training could learn the MTS system.
