Textile Substrate Digital Printing with Registration Marker Alignment
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current printing technologies for textile substrates, such as floorcoverings, face challenges in achieving in-register designs due to issues like substrate bow, skew, and shrinkage during manufacturing, leading to alignment and registration problems, especially when cutting carpet tiles from larger rolls, which limits the creation of unique and complex patterns.
Innovation Solution
The use of a digital printing machine that detects and responds to physical cues like tufted yarn heights, yarn luster, and yarn color to apply print compositions in predetermined locations on the textile substrate, ensuring precise alignment and registration of designs with the substrate's physical features, allowing for the creation of unique aesthetics and patterns previously unattainable.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Manufacturing precision
If conventional printing processes are used on textile substrates, then printing can be performed, but alignment and registration precision deteriorates due to substrate bow, skew, and shrinkage during manufacturing
Solution Approach 1:
The patent applies preliminary action by embedding registration markers in the substrate during manufacturing, before the printing process. These markers serve as reference points that allow the printing system to detect and compensate for substrate distortion, enabling accurate alignment and registration despite bow, skew, or shrinkage that occurs during substrate production.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent implements feedback by using detection systems to scan the substrate and identify the positions of registration markers. The system uses this feedback information to calculate distortion patterns and adjust printing head positions in real-time, ensuring that printed designs align precisely with intended locations despite substrate dimensional changes.
2Manufacturing precision
If digital printing technology is used to achieve in-register printing, then printing precision can be improved, but device complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent uses registration markers as intermediaries between the substrate and the printing system. These simple visual markers serve as a communication bridge, allowing the detection system to understand substrate position and distortion without requiring complex sensors or sophisticated communication protocols, thereby reducing overall system complexity while maintaining high precision.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent replaces complex mechanical alignment systems with an optical detection and computational approach. Instead of using intricate mechanical positioning mechanisms to ensure alignment, the system uses optical scanning of registration markers combined with software-based distortion compensation, simplifying the mechanical complexity while achieving superior registration precision.
3Manufacturing precision
If substrate distortion is compensated through complex alignment processes, then registration accuracy can be maintained, but manufacturing time and cost increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent applies preliminary action by pre-embedding registration markers in the substrate during the manufacturing process, before printing begins. This preliminary preparation enables rapid detection and compensation of substrate distortion during printing, eliminating the need for time-consuming trial-and-error alignment procedures and reducing overall manufacturing cycle time while maintaining high accuracy.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent uses registration markers as simplified copies or representations of the substrate's dimensional state. By detecting the positions of these marker copies, the system can infer overall substrate distortion patterns and apply compensatory transformations to the printing process, achieving accurate alignment quickly without requiring complex measurements or adjustments of the entire substrate.
Data Source
AI summary
This invention relates to a printed textile substrate, such as a floorcovering article, and a process for making a printed textile substrate. This invention provides the process and steps to print color patterns in-register with physical patterns, such as varying yarn pile heights, yarn luster, yarn color, and the like. This process provides many unique aesthetics on a textile substrate that cannot be created another way.