A Comparative Study of Optimal Design for an Inkjet Printer Tube With and Without Performance Variations

As a new generation of printing technology, thermal inkjet (TIJ) has been widely adopted to meet the increasing demand for high printing quality and efficiency at an affordable price. High air barrier tubes play an important role in the reliable operation of the printhead in a commercial thermal inkjet printer. Desired tube qualities include low stiffness and low pressure drop, along with others. Tube stiffness and pressure drop can be lowered through the selection of proper tube layer configuration, geometry, and material properties. However, the existing tube design practice is highly heuristic and design results are not optimal. In this work, using TIJ design as a real world example, a comparative study is conducted to support the use of formal methods in design applications previously governed by heuristic/trial-and-error approaches. Two cases using different optimization strategies are investigated: Case A—performance-based optimization strategy; and Case B—robust design-based optimization strategy. A comparison of their results with the current practice shows that the optimization strategies can greatly improve the efficiency of the current tube design process. More important, the optimization strategy with variation consideration yields robust results and provides much richer design knowledge to support designers with various experiences to make better decisions.