Energy buffered carriage reversal for wide format printing systems

In this paper, an innovative design of a carriage drive for wide format printing systems (WFPS) is proposed. The new drive design reverses the carriage by buffering the kinetic energy of the carriage resulting in a fast reversal and a high energy efficiency for higher productive WFPS. As an energy buffer, a mechanical spring connected to a clutch is used which engages smoothly enabling reversal at arbitrary moments. This way, only a small conventional carriage drive motor is needed to overcome the friction forces acting on the carriage. A prototype has been built and experiments have been conducted showing that the drive motor power can be reduced by at least by a factor of 30 while keeping the reversal time equal. This power reduction should compensate the extra costs needed for the drive-aid. Because the drive-aid can be easily scaled for higher productive WFPS, it has the potential to become an attractive alternative in the future.