I was printing off a paper for one of my writing classes, and I wondered...how does my tiny fifty dollar printer work so quickly?
According to popular science, most inkjet printers you buy at the store today have inkjets that deposit as small as one picoliter drops onto the paper at a rate of 22,000 drops per second(1).
There are two ways that the printer puts the ink on to the paper either by heating it up until it bubbles out (this is how my printer works) or buy applying pressure to it (1), this is the most interesting to me because they use a technology called piezoelectrics.
Piezoelectric disks work when an "electric field having the same polarity and orientation is placed across the disk...the disk then expands along the axis of polarization and then contracts perpendicular" (2). This is perfect for printer technology because they can then use the disk to draw the ink up into the nozzle and push it out on to the paper (1). Now that is one fancy piece of equipment. Makes me wonder though, how do those big office printers work? Do they use inkjets as well?
References:
1. Inside an Inkjet Photo Printer
http://www.popsci.com/gear-amp-gadgets/article/2009-03/inside-inkjet-photo-printer-0
2. PIEZO SYSTEMS, INC.
http://piezo.com/prodsheet3disk5A.html
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Inkjet printers are definitely very cool equipment. The ones that use Piezotransducers (PZT's) are capable of really high resolution printing. PZT's are essentially just crystals that expand or contract based on the electric field applied to them, and can be tuned to very precise distances, generally micro meters or smaller. They can also move very fast, on the order of meters per second, which is why they are used for high resolution inkjet printing and Cavity Ringdown Spectroscopy (CRDS). There is actually a research group that uses an ultra-high resolution printer with gold ink to print wire-grid polarizers for their research. All in all inkjets are really impressive pieces of equipment that get taken for granted.
After reading your blog, I had the same question about office printers.
Laser printers work because of static electricity. The lasers in the printer "draw" an electrostatic image onto the paper. Then the toner, which is really a positively-charged fine powder, is attracted to the negatively-charged parts of the paper (i.e. the letters on the page). Finally, the fuser heats the paper, causing the toner powder to melt, creating the image on the paper.
I got this information from: http://computer.howstuffworks.com/laser-printer.htm
PS - For those of you who use the PChem lab, now we know what the fuser output delivery system is. =0)
Piezoelectricity has several applications in terms of producing small amounts of induced voltage for several electronic devices. If only we could use it as a large scale energy source....
Post a Comment