Digital Press/Photocopiers

Digital Press

 The modern digital presses were born from an intersection of Xerography and Roll Printing.  Over the past 25 years, Capacitec has provided non-contact displacement and gap sensing systems to several of the major high speed color copier producers around the world. These digital presses include processes that use solid toner, liquid inks and wax based print materials.

These are some typical hidden access applications:

• Roller to roller gap/parallelism measurement

• Photo-receptor to paper shuttle alignment

• Optics alignment to media

• Print head to drum roll gap/parallelism

Photocopiers

Since the early 1980s Capacitec has worked with Photocopier manufacturers in the US, EU and Japan to provide a variety of specialized gap measurement systems used in R&D for prototype development as well as "electronic set up tools" in manufacturing. These non-contact capacitive displacement sensing systems were used as both set-up tools and in-line production gauges. Capacitive thin gap sensors were installed in extremely restricted locations in photocopier sub-systems such as paper feed, photo-receptor charge module, roller alignment, toner height control and document handling.

Here are some typical examples:

1. Capacitec supplied a one meter long thin gap sensor wand that travelled through hidden paper paths of a photo-receptor in a prototype photocopier to measure gap variability. The gap data was fed into an SPC data acquisition system with calculated C_pk trend analysis limits.

2. Capacitec developed non-contact displacement sensors wands mounted onto spring hardened shims. These were designed into an automated insertion tool in 3 locations (left side, center and right side) as an in-line production tool to measure toner bar to roller gaps.