Meteor Inkjet, which mainly develops electronic drive systems for inkjet printheads, has announced its new Nozzle Health Technology, which could potentially offer a major breakthrough in improving the lifespan of the average inkjet printhead.
One of the biggest problems for the adoption of inkjet technology is the reliability of the printheads, with the risk of nozzles becoming blocked and causing missing lines and other artefacts. There are a number of reasons for this, ranging from particles within the inks causing blockages through to the ink mist that is blown back around the nozzle plate, leading to dried ink that clogs the nozzles.
Improvements to filtration and automated cleaning systems, as well as recirculation through the printheads have all helped to reduce these problems and to extend the lifespan of the expensive printheads. However, these problems will become more exacerbated as inkjet vendors look to expand into more industrial applications, including coating, automotive paints and additive manufacturing, where they will have to cope with more functional fluids.
And all the printhead manufacturers know that if they want to sell their heads into truly industrial applications, where inkjet is just one part of a manufacturing process, then they will have to improve the reliability. This is particularly true for applications such as printed electronics or additive manufacturing, where missing nozzles can turn objects into expensive failures.
So anything that can improve the lifespan of the heads and cut down on the maintenance overheads and the risk of unplanned production stoppages would be welcome, and that’s what Meteor’s Nozzle Health Technology promises. The system works by sending a specific signal to the printhead and then measuring the impulse response back from each nozzle. This allows it to identify issues such as wetting, blockage, or air ingestion before they have caused any artefacts on the print.
It takes fractions of a millisecond and OEMs could configure the system to run the test throughout a print run, determining how often and for how long. Clive Ayling, managing director of Meteor Inkjet, notes, “For establishing the optimum diagnostic parameters and duration of the test, it is helpful to run some machine learning comparing the output against another measurement, for example, human eyes or Meteor’s MetVision camera-based nozzle health system.”
He explains, “We are using the head’s own PZT crystal to be a sensor to produce voltage signals that indicate if the nozzle chamber is operating differently from expected.” He continues, “The acoustic behaviour of the inkjet nozzle chamber is turned into electrical signals, which are then turned into digital data by Meteor Electronics. Our firmware makes sense of the digital data, and our software compensates for the faults and provides diagnostic information to our customers’ printer control software.”
If a problem is found, then for blocked nozzles the system can be set up to automatically compensate through Meteor’s NozzleFix software or for bigger issues, it can pause production for targeted maintenance before problems occur.
NozzleFix is a Meteor technology that was launched in 2019. Ayling explains: “A user can select to stop sending print data [typically a 0 (no drop), 1 (small drop)..3 (largest drop)] to a nozzle of their choice. Instead, an algorithm is used to determine how to affect the data sent to neighbouring nozzles in the same colour plane (intraplane compensation) and how to affect the nozzles from the other colour planes (interplane compensation) that also address the line in the image that was switched off. Thus, in a dark image cyan and magenta ink may be dropped into the line created by a missing black nozzle and/or in a light image, the unprinted drops may be simply diverted to a neighbouring working pixel.”
He notes, “It is a form of nozzle mapping, but it is not necessarily a 1-to-1 re-mapping because it is algorithmically determined, for example, neighbouring drop sizes may be increased in size.”
Meteor will add the Nozzle Health Technology to the electronic control boards, or Head Driver Cards, that it builds to drive inkjet printheads. Since Meteor already supplies electronics to drive a wide range of printheads from most of the printhead vendors, the NHT system can be used across most commercially-available printheads. However, users will need new versions of both the Meteor Head Driver Card and the Meteor PrintEngine data path software. It’s not available to end users, since Meteor sells its solutions to the OEMs manufacturing printing equipment, who may choose to offer it as an upgrade or a new version.
Ayling says, “We aim to make this a retrofit option to any Meteor-based print system: just replacing the head driver card with one that has been upgraded to include our Nozzle Health Technology, and then upgrading the software.” For now it’s a paid option, though Ayling says that it could in the future, become a standard feature.
In theory, the NHT system should work with any piezo printhead, regardless of whether its a bulk piezo or MEMs design. Ayling says that some existing head designs work better than others but that it’s not down to any particular characteristics – more just the luck of the draw.
The first NHT product is the HDC-R5-NHB for the Ricoh Gen5/ Gen6 heads, which Meteor showed to customers last week. Ayling says that this should be in production within the first half of 2026, with other product lines following every few months. He adds: “The order of the release will be determined by the purchase orders of early adopters.”
Ayling says that all the printhead vendors have encouraged Meteor to invest in this development, adding, “We are encouraged to have received enquiries from many customers with many different applications”.
And he suggests that in the future, some printhead vendors might take the requirements for the NHT into account when designing new heads, or even produce variants of existing heads, saying: “Whilst all PZT inkjet heads can theoretically be run as both inkjet ejectors and as inkjet chamber sensors, the design of the head can make this more or less practical to achieve. So far, few, if any, heads have been designed to provide both functions.”
Meteor itself has been working on this project for some years, and has already picked up patents in this area, as I’ve previously covered. You can find further details on Meteor’s portfolio from meteorinkjet.com and some initial information on the Nozzle Health Technology here.
