Thermal management in a printing machine for improvement of temperature response of printing process using design of experiments

This paper describes a thermal design method of printing process in printers that a lot of electrical components are mounted and the structure in the inside becomes complex because miniaturization and more additional functions are strongly demanded. Most of printing methods such as a laser printing and a thermal printing use heat in order to do the printing. In order to increase a reliability of the products while improving the printing quality and decreasing power consumption, elucidation and an optimization of heat transfer mechanism of the printing processes becomes important. However, the internal structure of the device has become significantly complicated. In order to achieve the optimization of thermal design in the printers, it may be useful to evaluate the dominant factors affecting heat transfer phenomena and the degree of influence to the temperature response during the printing process. In this research, we aim to construct a specification method of the control factors that affect the heat transfer phenomenon during the printing process to obtain the optimum design value of the components. We especially focused on the design process of a fixing belt. As a design objective of the belt, it is required that the temperature response is fast and the temperature on the heated belt is not changed during the printing process. In order to achieve these conflicting requirements, we tried to optimize the belt structure by combining three - dimensional heat transfer analysis and Design Of Experiments (DOE). Through the research, we acquired the design guides for the belt corresponding to purpose of using applicable printing machine and report the result.