Printing Array Control for Contoured Surface Inkjet Mapping
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Solution Overview
Problem
Commercially available raster image processors are computationally inefficient and costly when treating large contoured surfaces, such as those found on commercial aircraft, requiring significant computational resources for determining optimal ink droplet placement during high-quality inkjet printing.
Innovation Solution
A computing system comprising an input sensor, processor, and memory that generates a UV coordinate map, uses a lookup table to produce an ink density bitmap, and compiles a control plan to control a printing array for precise ink application on contoured surfaces, optimizing ink droplet placement and reducing computational overhead.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Manufacturing precision
If commercially available raster image processors are used to determine optimal ink droplet placement on large contoured surfaces, then printing quality can be maintained, but computational resources and processing time increase significantly
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the contoured surface into multiple planar facets, creating a faceted mesh representation. This segmentation allows the complex 3D surface to be processed as multiple simpler 2D planes, significantly reducing computational requirements while maintaining printing quality. Each facet can be independently processed and mapped to the printing array, enabling efficient determination of ink droplet placement without requiring computationally intensive full 3D surface analysis.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent creates a digital faceted mesh model as a simplified copy of the actual contoured surface. This mesh representation serves as a computationally efficient proxy that captures the essential geometric features needed for printing while requiring far less computational resources to process than the full high-resolution surface data, thereby improving computational efficiency without sacrificing printing precision.
2Measurement precision
If faceted mesh representation with high data sets is used to represent large contoured surfaces, then surface accuracy is improved, but computational overhead and processing cost increase
Solution Approach 1:
The surface is divided into a faceted mesh of multiple planar facets, where each facet represents a small portion of the contoured surface with sufficient accuracy for printing purposes. This segmentation approach maintains surface representation accuracy by using enough facets to capture the geometry, while reducing data complexity compared to using a single high-resolution continuous surface model.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent transforms the surface representation from continuous high-resolution data into a discrete faceted mesh structure. By changing the parameterization of the surface data into a mesh format with vertices, edges, and faces, the system achieves an optimal balance between surface accuracy and computational manageability, reducing the complexity of data sets while preserving essential geometric features.
Data Source
AI summary
A computing system includes an input sensor, a processor, and a memory storing executable instructions that, in response to execution by the processor, cause the processor to collect input data related to at least a portion of an object from the input sensor, generate a UV coordinate map based on the input data, use a predetermined process ink density lookup table to produce an ink density bitmap corresponding to the UV coordinate map, the ink density bitmap including process ink densities for each bit in the ink density bitmap, produce and output a dithering of bits of the ink density bitmap to thereby generate dithered image pixel data, and compile and output a control plan, based on the dithered image pixel data, to control a printing array to print an image on a contoured surface of the object.