• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.35 no.5
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• pp.575-582
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• 2011

A cleaning blade is an attachment installed in the toner cartridge of a laser printer for removing the residual toner from an organic photo-conductive drum. There have been many studies on the performance and life of the rubber blade. We focus on optimally designing the blade shape parameters to minimize the maximum stress of the blade while satisfying design constraints on the cleaning performance and part interference. The blade is optimally designed using a design of experiments, meta-models and an optimization algorithm implemented in PIAnO (process integration, automation, and optimization), a commercial PIDO (process integration and design optimization) tool. We integrate the CAE tools necessary for the structural analysis of the cleaning blade, automate the analysis procedure, and optimize the solution using PIAnO. We decreased the maximum stress by 32.6% in comparison with that of the initial design.