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:
Jul. 28, 2009
Filed:
Oct. 30, 2007
Osamu Shinkawa, Chino, JP;
Yusuke Sakagami, Shiojiri, JP;
Koki Tajima, Kobe, JP;
Seiko Epson Corporation, , JP;
Abstract
It is an object of the invention to provide a droplet ejection apparatus and a method of detecting and judging a head failure that can detect an ejection failure and carry out appropriate recovery processing according to a cause thereof. The droplet ejection apparatus of the invention includes a plurality of droplet ejection heads, each of the droplet ejection heads including a diaphragm and an actuator which displaces the diaphragm; a driving circuit which drives the actuator of each droplet ejection head; residual vibration detectorfor detecting a residual vibration of the diaphragm displaced by the actuator after the actuator has been driven by the driving circuit; pulse generator for generating reference pulses; information processorfor carrying out a computation for the number of reference pulses generated by the pulse generator on the basis of the residual vibration of the diaphragm detected by the residual vibration detector; time measurer for measuring a lapsed time since the actuator has been driven by the driving circuit; and head failure judgefor judging a head failure in the droplet ejection heads on the basis of the computation result of the information processorand the lapsed time measured by the time measurer.