The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Mar. 23, 1999
Filed:
Nov. 14, 1996
Manfred R Kuehnle, New London, NH (US);
Other;
Abstract
A printing apparatus (10) employs electrostatic gripper plates (12, 14, and 16) to stepwise advance printing substrates (18) in a reciprocating shuttle fashion past a print head (22) that contains microchannels (33) that are filled with ink by capillary action awaiting, in concave shape at each microchannel orifice, print activation which is accomplished by imposing electrical fields at each electronically addressable orifice to cause the ink to protrude in a convex shape. To cause the paper to be marked, certain orifices are activated in accordance with imagewise information that is stored digitally in a memory which feeds data for the print head to cause the ink to protrude in varying thickness dimensions from the addressed orifices in proportion to the imposed field intensities with said protruding ink positions being transferred to the printing substrate surface in step by step fashion as the substrate advances and is between each step brought momentarily in contact with the print head orifices and then withdrawn therefrom, said ink being preferably of the hot-melted type so as to accomplish instantaneous fusion of the ink when it touches the printing substrate surface and solidifies thereon, thereby causing the formation of a novel lenticular image topography.