Bart Theelen

Digital twins for print process development

To address the challenges of efficiently performing continuous innovation with sustainable quality, Canon Production Printing envisions the exploitation of models as leading artifacts during the complete life-cycle of printer variants. An ingredient in realizing this vision is to gradually complement and eventually replace (where possible) traditional printer development based on physical prototypes with model-based development approaches using virtual prototypes. This presentation highlights a virtual printer targeted at the evaluation of various print quality aspects to support development of novel print processes. Such print processes cover steps like image processing, positioning the jetted ink on media, and spreading & solidification of ink. Each print process step impacts print quality aspects like perceived image quality (e.g., how good does the printed image look) and print robustness (e.g., how well does the ink stick to the medium). A multitude of engineering disciplines (software, electrical and mechanical hardware, physics and chemistry) is involved in the development of print processes. At Canon Production Printing, all disciplines already exploit various models in diverse tools to support their design activities. These models intend to capture the essence of relevant print process related behavior as crux to allow predicting print quality aspects for novel print processes. By coherently combining these models, the print process is fully covered. This supports design activities such as refining requirements, clarifying what experiments remain to be done on dedicated laboratory setups, and performing sensitivity analysis, trend analysis, and design-space exploration. Hence, this virtual printer forms a key asset for the model-based way-of-working at Canon Production Printing.

About the speaker

Bart Theelen received his MSc in information technology sciences in 1999 and his PhD in electrical engineering in 2004 from Eindhoven University of Technology. His interests include industrial application of model-based methods, formalisms and techniques for the design, specification, analysis and synthesis of (embedded) high-tech systems, with particular focus on designing for system performance, virtual prototyping, model management and test. Before joining Canon Production Printing in 2017 as system architect on model-based development, Theelen conducted modelling projects at various industries including Alcatel Bell (B), IBM Research Laboratory (CH), ASML (NL), TPVision (B), Philips Healthcare (NL) and Barco (B).