• Journal of Sensor Science and Technology
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.124-129
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• 2010

For the industrial printing applications, the stability of the piezo-driven inkjet printhead is a major requirement. In this paper, we focused on the failure modes of the inkjet printhead and realized a method to detect and repair them at high speed. The printhead monitoring is performed by detecting the residual vibration of the actuating plate using the self- sensing capability of the piezoelectric material. To measure the channel acoustics and to identify the malfunctioning nozzle, we devised the bridge sensing circuitry and failure detection algorithm. The residual vibration signals can be affected by the boundary conditions of the channel acoustics, so it is possible to identify the failure causes by analyzing the monitoring signals. Therefore it is also possible to apply a proper restoring process to the defective printhead. The experimental results show that this method is effective in improving the reliability of the industrial printing.