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US 6,145,957 AGranted
Suction apparatus for inkjet printing device
AssigneeNEC Corporation
InventorsShinji Isobe, Koichi Tanaka
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
A suction apparatus includes a volume-variable chamber having an inlet and an outlet which is formed by a plurality of enclosing parts including an elastic part. A slider applies a force to the volume-variable chamber to decrease the volume thereof and a valve applies a force to increase the volume thereof. When the slider decreases the volume, the valve opens the outlet to drain ink and air from the volume-variable chamber. When the valve increases the volume, the valve closes the outlet to produce a suction force.
Claims7
A suction apparatus for sucking ink from an inkjet head, comprising:
- a cap for making contact with the inkjet when the inkjet head is located at a home position;
- a chamber having an inverted truncated cone shape with an elastic side wall, the chamber including an inlet at a top part thereof and an outlet hole at a bottom part thereof, wherein the inlet is connected to the cap;
- a sleeve disposed outside the chamber and in contact therewith, the sleeve being movable in a first direction to deform the chamber;
- a rod disposed within the sleeve and through the outlet, the rod having a seal that is disposed within the chamber and movable in the first direction to open the outlet hole and in a second direction to close the outlet hole and restore the chamber toward an original shape thereof;
- and
- a reciprocating drive mechanism which is coupled with the rod to drive the rod in the first and second directions, and, in various positions, is in contact with the sleeve to drive the sleeve in the first direction.
3 more elements
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.