Health monitoring and preventive maintenance for high-end printers

Professional printers are expected to be highly productive and customers expect them to work reliably 24×7. Moreover, due to an increasing range of functionalities, these printers become increasingly complex. Conventionally, thorough design engineering and several prototyping cycles are applied to obtain a reliable professional printing system. This process is time consuming and in a rapidly evolving printing world with fast-paced flexible customer needs, time-to-market has become a crucial success factor. Therefore, such a conventional approach is too time consuming and hinders fast development of reliable products.

Integration of system health monitoring (diagnosis and prognosis) will enable Canon Production Printing to provide effective predictive maintenance to our printing systems. This will help in increased functional up-time of printer, reduced service cost and improved customer satisfaction.

The Colorado-1650 printer, Canon Production Printing’s latest product in the graphic art market, is considered as a benchmarking system. In order to support wide range of applications this printer is equipped with a high level of automation. The printer can be calibrated for wide range applications and it utilizes several sensors to collect process data, which contains the signature of machine performance and degradation. This data will be used in the scope of the implementation and experimental testing of health monitoring techniques for the purpose of sub-system fault detection, diagnosis and prognosis. Moreover, Canon Production Printing will benefit from improved understanding on how sub-system level faults propagate to the performance of the entire printer system. Finally, PM algorithms will be tested on this printer benchmark system.