Design, construction, and verification of a printhead - tolerant towards bubbles - dosing liquid wax using rapid prototyping techniques

Since invention of ink-jet printing many new techniques and solutions to dose liquid media as drops have been developed. Today there are numerous drop on demand printheads for different fluids and applications. However characteristics of the fluid and working conditions have significant influence on the drop on demand printhead itself. Adapting a printhead to using other fluids often means extensive development work or even a completely new design. Thus, checking whether a certain principle of printing will work is decisive. In this paper design and construction of a piezo-element bender actuator based printhead using rapid prototyping techniques is presented. The result is a drop on demand printhead dosing liquid wax manufactured in less than a day.