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Archive for the ‘Hardware’ Category

We would have been still constructing the Panama Canal but for the modern gigantic construction equipments. These Herculean machines made life easy for us by their enormous strengths and capacities for long drawn heavy duties under all torturous conditions.

To think that these engineering marvels work for reclaiming lands from bays, striking piles into the hard sea beds or drilling tunnels deep below the sea beds (Trans European Tunnel connecting England to France), is mind boggling. The list can go endless but for the scope of this article which is limited.

Equipments to Suit All Needs
Construction equipments may be classified as per needs and further by capacities.

1. Excavating and Earth moving: These gigantic machines are hydraulically operated to safeguard from shock failures. These are the first machines to be employed for preparing the construction sites. Land leveling by digging and cutting terrains are done by excavators of appropriate capacities which run into 1000s of HP. Basic earth movers include dozers, tippers and loaders.

2. Concrete processors: Batch or continuous concrete mixers are computer programmed for consistent precise mix. These are stationed permanently near the site or in the factory depending on convenience. Small batch mixers of less than one quintal capacities are portable. The concrete is transported from far off plants in transit mixers of minimum capacity 6 cubic meters by volume. Concrete is poured to the spot using concrete pumps.

3. Bar bending machines: Small high torque generating bar bending machines are handy in bending and forming construction steel bars. These are available in various specifications.

4. Rollers and compactors: Rollers are employed to compact the ground after dozers have leveled it. Some rollers are also equipped with vibrating compactors eliminating the need for separate compacting. For small areas like indoors vibrating plate compactors, which generate up to 1000kgf maybe used. Read the rest of this entry »

Have you ever wondered how your inkjet printer works?

How does the ink get from the inkjet cartridge to the paper? Why is the print quality is so clear? Why the printing is so quiet?

Generally, all that most people know is that there’s some movement and a faint high pitched sound when it’s printing something — and then the finished document comes out.

Unlike dot matrix and character printers that strike ribbons to create an image, inkjet printers do not physically touch the paper.

All inkjet printers function using the same basic principles. Tiny ink droplets are “jetted” (or pushed) out multiple holes onto paper in a controlled and systematic fashion. This is where the term “inkjet” comes from.

The size of ink droplets, speed and reliability of this type of printer has been continuously improving since its inception in 1976. In 1993, Epson was the first manufacturer to produce an inkjet printer using micro-piezo technology. The Epson Stylus 800 was the first printer to use the multi-layer actuator printhead (the printhead is the part of the printer that holds numerous tiny nozzles that actually squirts the ink onto paper).

This specific printhead utilized an electro-mechanical element that acted like a tiny control room. When pulses of electricity passed through, it that gave specific signals to fire individual or multiple nozzles loaded with ink.

Micro-piezo technology utilized a tiny crystal in each individual nozzle that when electrically energized, would vibrate or bend causing a controlled amount of ink to be forced out onto paper. When the electrical current is off, the crystal bends back to its original shape, creating a vacuum, thus pulling ink into the nozzle from the reservoir for the next commanded fire.

The Epson printhead was fixed to the carriage so it never needed replacing (the printer carriage is what moves laterally across the paper). This also kept the cost of ink cartridges low since they were little more than reservoirs of ink.

This breakthrough printer produced a whopping 360 dpi (dots per inch) that was deemed, almost “letter quality” at the time. With a printing speed of 150 – 180 characters per second, the new Epson became the user favorite printer for home and office.

At the same time, HP was using a similar technology. A thermal jetting system was utilized in their printhead. The printhead still acted like the control room but each individual nozzle was instead independently super heated by electricity, which caused the ink to explode onto the paper. HP claims the temperature of a fired inkjet nozzle approaches that of the surface of the sun.

HP elected to put the printhead on the inkjet cartridge itself instead of mounting it permanently to the carriage. Since each inkjet cartridge would have its own printhead, replacement cartridges would be more expensive for these printers.
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Printers have certainly come a long way since the inception of the character and and dot matrix printers.

These ancient products (ancient in technical terms being as few as 10-15 years) were what are known as impact printers, simply because they needed to make a physical connection with the paper in order to achieve the ink-on-paper result.

Dot matrix printers came equipped with a group of pins that touched a ribbon which then connected with paper to produce the finished product. Character printers, which worked on the same principle as electric typewriters, used a bar or ball whose surface was embossed with all the characters you now see on any keyboard. These characters made contact with the ribbon, which in turn made contact with the paper.

Today we use non-impact printers – those that do not make physical contact with the paper to create the papered reproduction. The most prevalent for home or small office use is the inkjet printer – an economical choice for all but the most serious graphic arts requirements.

An inkjet printer produces the images and type it delivers from computer to paper by means of miniscule drops of ink. So miniscule, in fact, that a human hair would seem big by comparison. Standard ink drops of an inkjet printer have a diameter range of 50-60 microns. Arranged very precisely, these ink drops come in various resolutions (the higher the resolution, the clearer and more life like the output.) while 800×600 dpi (dots per inch) is a typical SOHO (small office home office) resolution producing quite adequate print quality, an inkjet printer can offer resolutions as high as 1440×720 dpi. Adding color to the mix can produce images nearly as high in quality as a laser printer product.
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In the early days there was a vast difference between an inkjet printer and its laser version but with time the difference has narrowed down to point where it is sometimes difficult to differentiate between the two. Most individuals continue to use the Inkjet printers, as they are less expensive and nearly all of them are colour capable. The quality of the inkjet printers has improved over time and now there is not a huge difference in printing quality with the Laser printers. It’s for this reason that small or home business can use an inkjet printer without having to worry about documents looking unclear or looking cheap.

The laser printer is capable of printing much faster and usually produces better quality image, it is far more expensive as compared to the Inkjet version. Laser printers are usually used for black printing but there are colour laser printers available now.

Having pointed that out, it is also useful to note that the general rule of the thumb for printers is ‘the lesser the cost of the printer, the more expensive the running cost”. This could however depend on the volume of printing the printer is being used for. If the printing volume were minimal, it would be more cost effective to use an inkjet printer. It is very easy to get carried away by the initial price of an inkjet printer but people buying them are often not aware that the running cost of the machine would play a huge part and should be factored into the decision making.

This would be better understood with an example. Let us consider a Canon i320 colour bubble jet printer. It usually does not cost more than £30 obviously subject to the discounts applicable at your store. The cost of a cartridge is usually in the £10 range and on an average it prints 170 pages. Even if you print as few as 7 pages a day that works out to 2100 pages over the year. This in turn works out to an annual expense of approximately £135. The amount one spends on cartridges is approximately 4 times the price of the printer in the first year itself. This is the reason the subsequent expenditure needs to be taken into consideration while buying a printer.
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